Awarded for completing Technical Debt at Machine Speed and passing its exam, demonstrating the ability to distinguish accumulated structural debt from the deliberate kind, recognise functionally equivalent duplication of decisive rules, identify abstractions that arrived by accumulation, apply a category based decision rule to new dependencies and configuration flags, test comprehension of a component against five specific questions, separate time to diagnose from time to restore and read its distribution, collect change failure rate, the explained fraction and decisive rule dispersion from an organisation's own estate, fund and run a refactoring rhythm as standing capacity, add structural questions to review without exceeding reviewer budget, and change onboarding and hiring for engineers who inherit code with no author to ask.
Certificates are designed to be checked, not just displayed.
The credential is valid for 12 months from issue. Its public page states the expiry date, and renewing means passing the current exam again — so the credential always reflects the current material.
