There has been a certain amount of ridicule, among members of the larger agile community (including XP, Lean/Kanban, and even among Scrum advocates), over the way in which the designation "Certified Scrum Master" is sometimes promoted and used (abused?). IBM's Scott Ambler, in a recent address at an InfoQ conference, went so far as to essentially say "Shame on agile thought leaders for not speaking out about this issue".

What agile teams are actually doing in practice

Although I think Ambler goes (more than a little) too far, he's certainly not alone in his criticisms, and other notable figures in the agile community, including Martin Fowler, have occasionally poked fun at CSM software process "experts". While even the harshest critics all completely support the need for training and see value in Scrum (and other agile/lean approaches), there is criticism of the idea that someone who attends a two-day study course (which, prior to Oct. 1, 2009, had no test that anyone could fail) may have paid a substantial amount of money to be led to believe that they are actually qualified to offer advice on restructuring the development process for the mission critical software of an enterprise organization and, what's worse, some corporate clients might actually believe them.

One of the other original founders of the agile movement, "Uncle Bob" Martin, sees this as nothing more than a simple "buyer beware" issue.

The CSM Integrity Deficit

Having personally suffered for six years under a dysfunctional corporate development environment, I feel, on the one hand, that ANY degree of progress toward agile would have been a huge improvement and, if a "CSM" badge helps convince management to make the necessary changes, then I'm all for it! On the other hand, having been exposed to the differences between working in a small development shop creating shrink-wrap commercial software for major publishers, compared with working on a large distributed project in a highly-regulated industry, compared with development at a Japanese company outside of Tokyo, compared with doing custom projects for small companies... I get a little uneasy at the way some CSMs with limited real-world experience seem ready to prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach to cover every situation based on a two-day training course.

When interviewing new hire candidates at my last three companies, I would always try to find out whether the candidate was familiar with notable dev. community authors, and whether they had attended dev. events, or persued certification... as evidence of some level of "devotion to craft", beyond simply working on their assigned feature. In that sense, I would consider CSM to be a big plus on someone's resume. At the same time, I know that, just as a "Microsoft Certified Professional" badge (or an EECS degree from a major university, for that matter) says absolutely nothing about whether or not someone can actually produce production quality code, I'd be wary of anyone who seemed to take their "CSM" badge too seriously. I've started wondering whether it wouldn't be better if the certification were renamed something a little less pretentious, like a simple "Scrum Training Certificate", or "Certified ScrumBum" ("Scrumbag"?), or something...

any thoughts?