This review is about the first part of the current
SCEA exam.
Assessment of Unfied Modeling Language is not included - This is a bit unsettling and mostly reflects the "criteria" that the exam creators felt was "relevant". In my opinion, UML is one of the most important aspects to object-oriented design, and is a real tool that the architect uses to communicate with his/her team. Large-scale enterprise systems can't really be designed and maintained without it. When new engineers come on board, the UML documentation is critical to helping them come up to speed quickly. It should not have been dropped from the exam.
Weakly written objectives - The objectives for the exam are unclear and very vaque. They do not reflect what knowledge based is being assessed. For instance, there are very few knowledge questions and a ton of subjective design-oriented questions, i.e. which design opinion below is the best?
Too many "name the best design" questions - The questions are not clear and there typically are too many answers that make sense. Software design is a gray area and there rarely is only one concrete design that works. Combine this with all the
Java acronyms and you end up with a really difficult question to answer "correctly". Are EJB3 and JPA different concepts? No, they are not.
Over emphasis of presentation tier technologies - Java Server Faces all over the place. Too much emphasis on
JSP pages and Java Server Faces. When compared with the number of questions about non-technical (QoS) requirements, it seemed that they pulled questions from the other certification exams for Java Developer or Web Developer. Individuals that just recently received Web Component Certification (SCWCD) will do extremely well on the current SCEA exam.
Looking to the future, I might not expect too many authors to write about exam preparation. The exam should be worked on a bit more. It was released too soon and is off a bit on the material covered. Instructional Designers are good, but this exam needs Sun Architects to review it and edit and guide, in my opinion.
Hope this helps.
[ April 19, 2008: Message edited by: James Clark ]