Marco:
Welcome to the fascinating process of working toward your OCMJEA!
I found this one to be the most fascinating part of the whole process. I felt it was a pretty fortunate draw for an assignment, being as how anyone taking it would have some knowledge of computers. ;-)
As far as hints, I don't want to violate any policies about dumps or anything. But here are some notes I think are not violating the spirit of the rules. In return, I would like to please ask you a question (see below).
* If you have never done, say, the
Java Developer certification you may not be familiar with these projects. Do read the instructions with exceedingly great care. Make sure you do not leave anything out.
* Having gathered by this time, that the OCMJEA is a lot about scenarios, it is not secret to say that this exercise should leverage that knowledge. While I did not get 100%, I did well. But
you should take this with a grain of salt. I would say to try and think about how much capacity your system must have, and use that to do your planning for things like deployment. When I did this, I thought about things like the size of the user base, computed from what I could find out about the potential user group for the system. By that I mean applicable vendors.
* Think carefully about what level of detail to do on the various UML diagrams. You have to balance showing enough detail vs going too far and making it impossible to grade.
* You can get Astah* Community for free. I used that for diagramming (would have preferred Enterprise Architect, but we used Macs at the time, so that was out). Despite my bias toward EA, based on others' opinions, Astah* is a great tool, and it has never let me down. I would recommend that to anyone. It may not have the connectivity of EA, and you should check that it can export diagrams before investing too much time. But even the Professional version is inexpensive.
Now, my question to you. If you do not mind my asking, why are you pursuing OCMJEA? I want to send you an out-of-band message about this.
I hope it helps