a view from afar

I came across this the other day on Kevin Rutherford's blog: a network for agile developers called We Vouch For. I'm not sure I like the name, but the idea is very worthwhile. (Think LinkedIn but for agile peer certification.) This was a topic that came up in the Q&A session at the end of Agile North 2007, and it was clear from the amount of discussion that the problem is far from solved.

I hope the site takes off, because hiring good developers is excruciatingly difficult. It's quite possible to get a hundred developer CVs and not one that's even heard of agile (or even something fundamental like automated testing). In fact, just being able to define TDD would put them in my top 5%, based on CVs I've seen in the past.

A quick brain-dump of things I think might be good on We Vouch For:

• categorisation of skills, currently it's purely organic
• some use of the certifications to rank developers (I wonder if the Google PageRank algorithm would work?)
• some sort of geographical mapping
• dating certifications (that is in the sense of attaching a date to a certification)
• (possibly) a use of the Apprentice-Journeyman-Master system, although while I like those terms they are difficult to pin down precisely

I have signed up, but I haven't worked with any of the developers on there so I'm not likely to be certified any time soon :)