5. LAVA Certified Assessor Team Requirements

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Looking for a position on the LAVA Certified Assessor Team? Here's what you need to be considered:

Time

You need to be able to dedicate up to half an hour a week to your duties. Sometimes you won't be needed at all, other times the whole half an hour will be taken up. Hopefully, with the addition of new members to the team, the workload will be share some more, so the chances of being needed every week should drop. We try to assess LAVAcr submissions within the second business day of them being submitted, so whilst you won't need to be continually polling the submissions area, you'll need to check it out every day or two.

Style

You need to demonstrate to the current members of the team that you know how to code LabVIEW, and that your coding style is fit to rise above the LAVA Certified standard. To prove this, you need to submit your own example to the LAVAcr and have it assessed as an exemplary hunk of code by a current member of the team. If you already have an approved submission in the LAVAcr that you'd like to be considered as your example, please let me know.

Tools

You're going to need, obviously, access to the tools that you need to get the job done, namely a copy of LabVIEW. The version isn't that important, as we get submissions in versions as far back as 7.0.1. You may need to download and install additional components to asses a submission, including (but not limited to) OpenG packages. If you're not comfortable doing this, then the assessment power you have is severely limited, and you won't be of much help to us.

Guts

The LAVAcr is built of a pretty strict ethic of style and usability. We designed the repository to not be a free-for-all where anyone can dump whatever they wanted and call it great code - our submissions are assessed for their overall benefit: not just functionality, but whether they promote good coding skills and practises. To that end, you will need to have the guts to deny a submission, but also have the back up of why it's denied, and the ability to make suggestions on what can be improved to encourage the member to resubmit their solution. This not only keeps our repository high quality, but also provides positive feedback to users and makes them better programmers. Around 70% of all LAVA Code Repository submissions are denied on their first submission - that's a relatively high proportion. To our team's and member's credit, all of those who failed the initial round resubmitted their code and passed the LAVA Certified processing the second round. That's a statistic we're very proud of. You don't need to be mean and picky on all things, but you do need to be able to recognise when submitted code isn't appropriate, and be able to stand up to the member with a well-founded and backed-up report on things that need improvement (it's not a difficult as it may sound: we have standard templates for that).

Dedication

There are a number of ways you can show your dedication to LAVA, and one of the most important is a Premium Membership. At this stage, we're not accepting applications from anyone but Premium Members, so if you're not one, now's the time to step up and throw in your 11 cents a day.