A Texas fire alarm license is not a rank. It is a subset of verbs. 28 TAC § 34.611 issues six licenses and two approvals, and it describes every one of them the same way — by listing the functions the license or approval is issued for, and stating that an individual or entity must be licensed or approved to lawfully perform those functions. Read the rule end to end and the same words keep reappearing in different combinations: installing, inspecting, servicing, testing, maintaining, monitoring, certifying, planning. That is the whole design. Nothing in the rule ranks one class above another; the classes differ in which verbs they carry and over what kind of property.

The statute supplies the meanings, and three of them are wider than the words suggest. Insurance Code § 6002.002 defines installation to include not only the initial placement of equipment but the extension, modification, or alteration of equipment already in place. It defines service, or servicing, as inspection, maintenance, repair, or testing — which is why the rule’s longer lists and the statute’s shorter ones reach the same work. And it defines monitoring as the receipt of fire alarm and supervisory signals, or the communication of those signals to a fire service communications center in Texas or serving property in Texas. A class that carries servicing therefore carries inspection and testing with it, and a class that carries installing reaches a retrofit as surely as a new job.

One consequence of building classes out of verbs is worth stating before the class-by-class sections begin: the question is never whether a licensee is qualified, in the ordinary sense of the word. It is whether the verb the job requires appears in the list for the class held, and whether the property is the kind that class covers. Those two tests decide everything in this chapter. And because Chapter 3 established that a licensee acts under a particular registered firm’s certificate, the practical form of the question is what the FIRM may take on through the person holding that license — which is how each scope below is stated.