Testing: certification

[jenk]

I've had a few people mention the Software Quality Engineer Certification, or CSQE. It's the first software-testing related cert I've heard of, so I looked into it a bit.

It seems interesting to me - but as a "hm, lots of interesting stuff here" not a "yeah, that would help me do my job better". It's QA in the broad sense; project management and dev management and test management and testing and and and. I will note that many of the topics involved in the CSQE dovetails with my recent Amazon purchases....

• Software Testing Fundamentals : Methods and Metrics by Marnie Hutcheson
  
• Testing Applications on the Web by: Hung Q. Nguyen
  
• Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco
  
• The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun

Offhand, I get most of these practice questions right. However, "According to Crosby", "Halstead's software science metric" and "According to IEEE standards" draw blanks. So do terms like "cyclomatic complexity", "requirements analysis methodologies", "minor nonconformance", and "defect escapes". Some I could deal with in context, mind you. I even got the "According to Crosby" one right by just picking the right answer and not worrying about what Crosby thinks... ;)

But. The fact that I'm tripping over terminology - and references to Six Sigma, ISO 9000 & IEEE - tells me this is not "my" [shrinkwrap software] world. Does that mean it's a bad thing? No. Just not sure

1. How much of it would be learning new things
2. How much of it would be learning new names for things I already know
3. How much of it would be useful

#2 & #3 in part depend on where my career goes down the road. I think the new terminology would become useful pretty quick if I ever wanted to move out of shrinkwrap....