Kenya ICT Board and CMU to Unveil a Local Software Development Certification

Kenya ICT Board has sent out an invite and update on various events happening this month. One of the most notable event is where Professor Randal Bryant, Dean, Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, is expected to be the key note speaker. The event is named Chipuka loosely translated to mean “emerge”.

Prof. Bryant has been among the Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University who have been working with the Kenya ICT Board to create a certification that will help employers identify software developers with the required skills necessary to tackle modern day challenges.

According to a release on CMU website,

“the Software Developer Certification will be what’s known as an authentic exam, in that it will require people taking it to perform the kind of tasks encountered in an actual work environment. Exam takers will add software features, correct errors or otherwise make modifications on a model software system.”

The exam will initially be implemented in Kenya, but CMU intends to push that it become “an international benchmark for use by employers worldwide.”

The unveiling of the certification by the Kenyan government will be on Tuesday 7th February at Strathmore University.  Kenya has been sponsoring development of the certification through the Kenya Transparency and Communications Infrastructure Project (KTCIP), which is funded by the World Bank and headed by Victor Kyalo.

A project scientist who has been leading the project, Philip Miller, said that a pilot exam will be ready by March 2013, and the main certification should be fully operational in Kenya by October 2013. It is not clear when the certification will be available worldwide.

Kenyan techies might not jump at this opportunity now considering that there were previous attempts by the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KeBS) and Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK) to come up with standards for local IT products including software. The effort became a cropper and have not been heard of ever since.

Apart from Bryant and Miller, the other CMU researchers involved in the project include Roger Dannenberg, associate research professor of computer science; Robert Seacord, secure coding team lead at Carnegie Mellon’s well-known Software Engineering Institute (SEI), and SEI certification experts Jefferson Welch, Marsha Pomeroy-Huff and Mary Ellen Rich.

The Kenyan seconded from the ICT Board to work with the researchers is Andrew Lewela Mwanyota. Andrew is an alumni of Deakin University and University of Nairobi.

Carnegie Mellon University recently announced that it will be opening a campus in Rwanda to offer graduate degrees in Engineering.