Hello, and welcome to the team that helps you prove your Atlassian knowledge and skills.
We’ve launched a new series here on Community called “Behind the scenes with Atlassian Learning.” If you’ve ever wondered about the certification lifecycle, or how the team ensures fairness and reliability, this series is for you.
Let’s meet the team!
Ree Kent leads the Credentials & Certifications team. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and loves reading, travel, and photography. Before joining Atlassian, she worked as a consultant, technical trainer, and agile coach at an Atlassian Partner.
Joanna Thurmann is a Senior Certification Developer on the team. She lives in San Jose, California, and is passionate about service, social justice, boots-on-the-ground activism, roofing homes in Mexico, and teaching nonviolence.
Mike Kosh is a Senior Certification Developer on the team. He lives in Dallas, Texas. He enjoys traveling and the never-ending pursuit of perfecting his Spanish and Portuguese.
Zarogina Azocar is a Senior Certification Developer on the team. She lives in Roseville, California, with her rescued cat Freya and enjoys indoor target archery, travel, and paper crafting.
Maurilio Gorito is a Senior Certification Program Manager on the team. He lives in Sacramento, California, and enjoys traveling, hiking, running half-marathons, and spending time with the family.
Velma Howard is a Certification Developer on the team. She lives in North Carolina and enjoys spending quality time with her family and contributing to military communities.
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I understand not all teams follow best-practices, but do the certification exams purposefully utilize worst practices to try to trick test takers? In some of the Jira practice exams there are access questions where the group confluence-access could theoretically grant Jira admin access. Sure, there's nothing preventing you from doing this, but it almost seems like Atlassian is recommending these practices by putting them in the exam.
Should there be a banner on exams that says 'Assume Best Worst Practices'. I haven't taken an official exam yet, so maybe it's there, but on the practice exams it's not.
I love this team! Thank you all for everything that you do!
@Mathew Lederman as someone who has worked with the certification team on validating exam questions, one of the things they are trying to do especially with the professional exam is to test deep understanding of the various features and components, without creating questions where all the incorrect answers are complete throw away options where you don't have to stop to think about it.
Are some of these options that are "technically correct" bad practices? Sure, but I'm not sure how you would go about testing a deep understanding without having some options like this or options that are so easy that it's no longer a challenge.
Knowing this team, if you have some suggestions I know they are more than happy to listen to feedback.
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
@Jimmy Seddon appreciate the response and the feedback. I can understand the desire to validate a deep understanding, but in my view, similar but incorrect options would be better than bad practices. For example:
A user who can have issues assigned to them but can no longer move an issue through its workflow has likely been removed from which project role:
Administrators
Read-Only
Users
Transmutation
Alchemy
Transposition
Sure, there's nothing preventing the Read-Only role giving access to the transition issues permission, but best-practices would suggest the Read-Only role gives a user browse access only. And there's nothing preventing a Jira admin from creating project roles called 'Transmutation' and 'Alchemy' if that makes sense to their process (and if they're big fans of Fullmetal), but to a normal user in the large majority of circumstances, the most likely scenarios are the Administrators and Users roles.
Do we, as admins, need to know every possible option for every available configuration to verify a deep understanding of the tool? Or is good practice (not even best practice) sufficient?
The exams typically focus on features rather than best practices. However, this does not mean that there will never be questions specifically addressing best practices.
It is possible that an exam question would include a scenario that demonstrates anti-patterns and asks the test taker to identify a root cause. The scenario in your first post is a great example of this. Something along the lines of...A user has Jira admin access, and their only membership is in a group called “confluence-access.” The exam question is testing on the exam taker's knowledge that group names do not necessarily reflect their actual use. The ability to troubleshoot is one of the fundamental aspects of the successful candidate for the exams; the professional exams in particular.
Our team is committed to avoiding trick questions, which is a key guideline we follow during exam development. If you're interested, you can apply to become an Atlassian Certification Subject Matter Expert (SME) and contribute to the exam development process! Your insights and expertise would be greatly valued.
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