[BSDCert] Announcement: Task Analysis Survey Launched

[Dru]

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, [iso-8859-1] Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:

> "George R." <george at sddi.net> writes:
>> But IMO, this effort for a BSD certification is aimed at sysadmins,
>> not developers.
>
> So what you are saying is that because I'm a professional software
> developer, not sysadmin, my knowledge and experience with FreeBSD is
> of no interest to the bsdcert team?
>
> I started to fill out the survey, leaving question 1 blank, but gave
> up on page 4 or 5.
>
> First of all, the format is very awkward.  The checkboxes should
> really be radio buttons.

<snip>

Thanks, DES and others for your comments. They are helpful not only for 
the survey itself but for the upcoming curriculum process.

I'd just like to clarify a few points.

Yes, we know the checkboxes are awkward. We chose this particular survey 
front-end because it supported internationalization and it was important 
to us to have the survey available in multiple languages. We ended up 
having to hack a lot of code to get some of the features we needed in. It
would have taken much more code hacking to integrate 3 rows of radio 
buttons per question.

While the cert itself will be aimed at system administrators (see our 
mission statement at http://www.bsdcertification.org/goals.htm), we are 
interested in the point of view of anyone who is interested in BSD. It 
helps us to keep the exam both practical and credible by knowing what is 
important to administrators, teachers, end-users, developers, managers and 
students. Which means that every question won't apply to everyone and that 
there are questions some people won't have any idea about. Which is why we 
included comment boxes on every page. While the questions themselves will 
provide us a nice statistical analysis, the comments will prove to be the 
meat of the survey.

As to changing the questions, it really is too late in the game. As we 
speak, over 60 people are translating the survey into 20 different 
languages and a couple of those languages are ready to launch today or 
tomorrow.

Please, do use the comment boxes to add or clarify questions. We started 
with a pool of over 800 questions and spent weeks whittling them down to 
just over 200 to try to keep the survey within a sane time limit. If a 
question that is important to you doesn't show up, add it in.

Dru