> I pray there is not. I would find it repugnant.

I used to believe very strongly that certification goes against the
values of XP, but for a while I have been wondering if there might be
a good way to do XP certification.

I agree with the recent statement by the Agile Alliance that
certification should be mostly skills-based, not knowledge-based. Or
more precisely, that there should be a very strong skills-based component.

Something that might help is a system along the lines of Advogato
(http://www.advogato.org/). That was originally set up to help find
out if a candiate was suitable as a committer on open source projects.
It ranks people as Apprentice, Journeyer, or Master, based on the
judgement of the community as calculated by a trust metric. I like the
craftsmanship bit. But then I am a moderate craftite ;-) I also like
the fact that the certification process is owned by the community and
not by a single company. I like the fact that the trust metric is
transparent. I think trust metrics are cool in general. All in all, I
think there is value in it.

But I don't think it is the whole answer or even most of it. On
balance, right now, I cannot foresee a certification process for XP
that I would support, but I do believe it is worthwhile to think about it.