I would not dare to pretend that we are finished up creating technology exams that pertains to Java developers. There are so many Java related technologies, that we could triple our list … but we’ve filled much of the gap.
Now that work is done, I see a demand for higher level exams:
But I’ve to admit that I just don’t see how to do that on JavaBlackBelt now.
Architecture
What would you ask about architecture? You’d probably have to torture me before making a JavaBlackBelt exam advocating the use of J2EE/EJB (v2).
Would you ask to enumerate/recognize the patterns proposed by Martin Fowler in its book
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture? I’m not sure Martin would love the idea.
Methodology
What would you ask about methodology? Enumerate the official values of eXtreme Programming? Recognize that Scrum is heaven and waterfall is hell?
The problem with methodology and architecture is that ... it depends on the context. What works for a team/project would not be suitable for another. It is rarely black or white.
Do you imagine a multiple choice question describing a team and project, then asking to select the best option for that situation? Any question of that kind that I’ve seen is poor, is not scientific, is debatable.
I understand that declaring a person is a good architect or project manager, must be done by a human. But, I feel that we can (and don’t know how) help solving part of this evaluation on JavaBlackBelt, a scalable way.
I was discussing the matter at
JAOO with
Michael Feathers. A was a little bit drunk (it was just after my interview with Juggy...) but I can remember his clever suggestion: what about asking community members to (manually through mails and interview) assess other community members on-line.
It is certainly a way to explore, a little bit as LinkedIn where you recommend somebody because you know him/her.
It someway hits my initial idea of having brown belts needing to find black belts to promote them to black.
We have much to think before we get a nice solution.
What do you think ?
Today, I released a plugin for Confluence that shows the status of one or more users of JavaBlackBelt.
Confluence is an enterprise WIKI that is highly extensible by using plugins. To get an idea of how these plugins are built, I made one myself. I happened to be playing around with JavaBlackBelt, so I decided to use that as an example. The goal was to have my JavaBlackBelt status (in the form of an image of a (karate/judo) belt) displayed dynamically in Confluence.
After some browsing through examples I found out that all I had to do was implement the Macro interface. Implementing the hasBody(), getBodyRenderMode() and isInline() methods was a piece of cake. The harder work was with the execute() method. What this method does is generate the HTML that shows what you want to show using the macro. Luckily the guys from JavaBlackBelt already built a javascript library that I could use. Therefore, most of the work was in parsing the parameters of the macro and having a decent error handling mechanism in place. The resulting code shows this.
