PART 1: Professional Crash Dump Analysis and Debugging

Software Diagnostics Professional Certification

Software Diagnostics Services¹ offers a certification in pattern-oriented software diagnostics for software technical support and escalation engineers, software engineers and quality assurance engineers with the following assessment areas:

•    pattern-oriented memory dump analysis

•    pattern-oriented software trace and log analysis

The focus is on unintentional software behavior such related to crashes, resource consumption (CPU, memory leaks), and hangs. For intentional software behavior there is Memory Forensics Professional certification (page 83) under development. The Windows track tests the ability to recognize patterns using the following analysis tools: WinDbg from Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows and Process Monitor.

The certification has the following features:

•    Two-factor certification:

    The first phase is based on real software execution artifacts, not on questions;

    The second phase involves questions about analysis results to assess understanding;

    Each certificate has its own verifiable CID (Certificate ID).

•    Each assessment score transcript has its unique PID.TID (Performance ID and Transcript ID).

•    Each candidate gets a set of unique memory dumps and software traces.

•    Evaluation by individual and overall exam group performance (when there is a sufficient number of candidates and may be postponed initially until the right group size).

•    Second free attempt after one month if the applicant does not pass an assessment.

¹ http://www.patterndiagnostics.com/Certified-Software-Diagnostics-Professional