The Accredited Symbian Developer Program is a significant step, moving Symbian OS developers towards a truly recognized profession. Symsource, who were instrumental in the development of the examinations that accompany the program, is a primary reseller along with Accredited Symbian Developer program partners EMCC Software. Symsource’s web portal allows developers to take the exam at their leisure.

The exam is taken on-line and requires around an hour and a half to complete. On completion of the test, results are delivered via email.

So what does the examination test? Tim identifies three key areas of Symbian OS development that could have been tested, but the test only covers the two most important ones. “We don't test whether the candidate can memorize command arguments, methods and constructors. Anyone can read these from the documentation. More importantly it’s not how real developers work. They know what the right tools for the job are, they don't memorize APIs,” says Tim. “So the exam concentrates on the other two areas of theory, such as why is an active object better than a thread, and of real experience, not just the things someone could read from a text book. The experience questions ask ‘what is the best approach in this situation?’ or ‘which of the following is a valid approach when this is the problem?’. They are things that developers only know if they had done it time and time again, over a period of at least a few months developing their own projects.”

The exam has been extensively tested and calibrated using the answers of engineers from Symbian themselves as well as external companies, like Symsource. “The exam has been set to test the skill a competent developer should have acquired after about one year’s solid Symbian OS experience,” says Tim. “Anyone with that sort of grounding in Symbian OS development should be able to pass the exam.”

Symsource practices what it preaches, as all its engineering staff have taken the exam. Tim proudly notes that Symsource is the first company to have an engineering staff entirely made up of Accredited Symbian Developers. Tim does not expect to retain that exclusive status for long, as other companies realize the value of such a claim.

So what stops anyone claiming they have passed the exam? The accreditation program is administered on Symbian’s behalf by Majinate: apart from the provision of security-printed certificates. Part of the service offered by Majinate is a registration check. Accreditation details of all qualified developers are held in a secure database, which can be queried ad-hoc by third parties with the correct privileges. Additionally, the exam can be run in a reduced form as a rapid (30-minute), low-cost check of a candidate’s qualifications.

Passing or failing the exam does not have to be the end of the process. Symsource offers a training needs analysis tied to the examination, both for individuals and companies. “A company can apply the test to a particular team or whole department of engineers,” says Tim. “For each of those engineers the company would get an analysis that might say ‘they are weak in sockets but strong in data types’. Our clients have limited training budgets. We can use the exam as a way of determining who needs what training, which helps us advise our clients where we can add best value while bringing their teams up to an industry recognized, objectively measured competency standard.”

Next year the scheme is going to expand with a Professional option. This will be more advanced and allow developers to look at specialization, in areas such as multimedia or telephony. According to Tim the Professional scheme will be particularly important for companies looking for engineers to build devices.

There is more information on the Accredited Symbian Developer Program on Symbian’s Web site. Developers can register to take the examination on Symsource’s Web site at www.symsource.com/register.htm while employers and agencies can find out more about program services from Majinate’s Web site at www.majinate.com.