Hi everybody,
Recently, I passed the exam and I thought I would like to share my experiences with you since you have helped me greatly in achieving the certification. My score was:
Class Diagram (44 maximum) .......................... 43
Component Diagram (44 maximum) ...................... 44 Sequence/Colloboration Diagrams (12 maximum) ........ 08
My class diagram was in the style of the Cade book where the only
J2EE classes shown are the Session Facades. The class diagram followed the BDOM very strictly, but of course a few additions were necessary.
When I started designing, I had several component diagrams a la Cade, but they had a high degree of redundancy and the decomposition into several diagrams were quite hard to get right. Finally, I decided to go with one component diagram and I felt that was much easier. Granted, the diagram is quite large, but it is still manageable for this size of project.
I had four sequence diagrams, one for each use case. The sequence diagrams were very detailed. Perhaps too detailed for an overall architecture, so that might have cost me the points in that category.
The accompaning document was quite brief. It listed the assumptions made (approx. 10) and explained the design of each tier in broad terms. Printed I think the document was 1-2 pages long.
I used 50 hours on Part I and 75 hours on Part II. I had no prior experience with J2EE, but have learned a lot by reading the "Core J2EE
Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies" which is highly recommended for Part II. Playing around with Sun's J2EE-server and
JBoss also helped put one or two things straight.
Finally, I would like to thank all who have contributed to the lively discussions in this forum. Searching the archives have really cleared up a lot of things for me!