LabVIEW
CLA-R General Advice?
Hi All,
My CLA (Certified LabVIEW Architect) cert is up for renewal, and of course this year there's the new recertification multiple-choice test. I looked at the official CLA-R preparation page, but I've noticed that the new sample test has a lot of software engineering questions and content that seems to differ substantially from the long version of the CLA.
Thus, I'm asking a pretty broad question here: Can anyone advise as to what might be the best resources for refreshing one's memory on certain terminology and concepts? My fear here isn't related to LabVIEW development questions; Rather, I'm more worried about the specific flavor of software engineering information that NI generates questions from. (For example, which of myriad development life cycle methodologies are fair game?) I haven't taught the advanced class in some time now, so I'm not really sure what's in it now or whether that would be relevant.
Disclaimer: I'm sure that anyone answering this post knows this, but just in case, please don't tell me anything that violates the NDA.
Thanks,
Jim
No takers? Have I used the wrong forum for this question? If so I apologize for my ignorance.
Thanks very much [Sir] Ben.
I may just have to dust off my old software engineering textbooks and make some flashcards, myself. I also see that they're referencing a lot of obscure LabVIEW features, some of which I use more often than others. (The kinds of topics that, during Developer Day, you might win a gift card for talking about, or answering a question about) I think I'll add those to my flashcards, too.
Man, just when I thought I had the CLA exam process figured out! I knew I should have made it to the summit!
Thanks again!
Kind regards,
Jim
(heading off to LAVA land)
The by far easiest path is to circumvent the recertification exam, by doing recertification by points. I did it that way the last two times and if you attend user group meetings and an occasional community event like GDevCon, you should be easily able to collect the necessary points for that. You do have to request the registration of those points yourself, there is no automatic point registration, not even for NI hosted events.
I did a recertification exam somewhere around 2017 or so and yes, it was quite a bit about software development practices and specifically one or two books (not specifically LabVIEW related) that while not really wrong or bad, still could be argued to NOT be the Holy Bible of software development practices. I was fortunate to work in a company then that had been requiring people to have an active certification and we would be actually practicing in small groups together by doing sample recertification exams and discussing the merits and demerits of the various questions and answers.
Some of the questions are pretty easy if you haven't been resting under a stone for the last 20 years, others are deliberate trick questions, and a few were simply very debatable, but once you understand the angle that the exam creator was thinking at, you can reason even those. The most difficult ones were those that were requiring knowledge of the exact terms used in those books. There was not much logical reasoning with that, it was simply that you needed to know those words and the order the book wanted them to be applied in the software architecture process.
There should be some sample recertification exams on the still almost impossible to search NI site, but maybe they all have been getting lost in the NI website CMS system.
Some links that Google can produce:
https://download.ni.com/evaluation/certification/cla-r/cla-r_sample_exam_english.pdf
https://forums.ni.com/t5/Certification/CLA-exam-preparation/td-p/2821336
