Certification
Gearing up for the CLA.
Good luck !
Did you get to complete it within time ?
Also, are you able to share about your choice of design pattern or if you used LVOOP?
fine that there is such a discussion place, for I have following concerns:
In some weeks, i will do the CLA exam.
Last week, iIbegan practizing with the sample exam.
On my first try, I did NOT read carafully the reqs fist but began simply to design something parallely...
...and at a certain point discovered that with my chosen design it would be hard to fulfill certain requirements.
As a conclusion, I learned it is important to read all requirements carefully before beginning.
So, on my second practize try, I took my time to read through and make notes.
Although, the result of that reading phase was useful
(I managed to make something which fulfills most requirements afterwards),
as I looked on my watch,
after I finished the reading-and-making-notes-phase, I needed almost an hour just for reading carefully
which is definitely too much!
So my question:
How much time should I spend for reading at the beginning of the exam at least and how much at most?
Any experiences are welcome!
Second question:
Is for each module the number of points to be earned proportional to the number of requirements?
For example, the User Message Handler has 4 requirements (2 main+2subs),
the Deposit State has 8 Requirements (4main+4subs).
If I am in time trouble, is it better
* to do something with the Message handler and write in the Deposit Case something like
"Deposit almost similar to Withdraw,blah,blah,.." (followed by a list of [Covers]-Statements ;->)
or
*to leave a User Message Handler VI empty and harvest all points for the Deposit State?
and my third question (no serious question, but anyhow):
* Is there a proof (at best as documented video ;->) that some NI developer created the sample solution
in fact in 4 hours or less?
I believe that you should spend no more than 15 minutes on reading the requirements.
On the # requirements, I believe it is a % of the completed requirements that earns you the points.
If you don't have time, the best approach would be to make sure your architecture/design patterns are done. Then I'd pick pieces of the requirements and start documenting what you'd have done.
One of my main challenges was to identify where to code a bit and where to instruct a secondary developer to complete it.
I recently took my CLA, so we'll see how I did 🙂
I want to thank for the anwer given to my questions.
During the last 2 months, I took the CLA exam and ...
...passed! (result slightly above my optimistic version of estimation)
Here are some hints which may be useful for preparation:
Deriving from the recent post, saying of spending not more than 15 minutes for reading before beginning design
[in fact, as a non-native speaker I spent about 20mins - the tradeoff of such abbreviated reading time
is of course that with the quickly chosen design, you may not be able to fulfill some requirements in a later stage - But you need no perfect solution!],
I developed a strict time-management during preparation:
During my multiple practise exam runs, I used a stopwatch in parallel to measure the time spent on each module.
This gave me a metric of how fast I am, giving on the one hand room for optimizations (e.g. not coding too much or using more uniformity)
and giving me on the other hand an idea what can I accomplish in 4h and what not.
Although the content of the "Managing Software Engineering" course does not play such an obvious role in the exam,
I recommend making a project schedule with the practise exam as a base (of course, in real exam, you have to adapt your schedule).
In this project schedule, I set milestones (e.g. for me: having the Main.vi and SOME modules complete after about 100minutes
- if your work order is another, your milestones may vary), which avoids being lost in some minor code modules and forgetting the overall structure.
Normally, customers rather accept a small delay but expect a complete solution. In the exam, your time is fixed and you need only a 70%-solution.
For that scenario, something like e.g. Timeboxing as a project planning method may be useful.
Useful may be also:
* Practise under imperfect conditions. During practise, you may be slower than you can.
But if there would be something in the real exam not perfect, it may not bother you.
If conditions are good in real exam, you may even be slightly faster than your estimations.
(Concerning me, I practised on a laptop with small screeen and only touchpad)
* as an exercise, try to design a module as best as you can in a time significantly lower than your estimation.
(e.g. a modul which needs 30mins in 15-20mins). Of course the result won't be complete, but you train to handle with the "Zeitnot" at the end.
(use the pareto principle, which means here: good documentation + tagging which would earn the points and not too much coding)
