M.F

Hi everyone, First of all, a big thanks for these threads that are a valuable source of information for the CLA candidate. I have also experienced a fail in the CLA exam recently and I wanted to share my results and thoughts about the exam. I will start with the exam conditions : I found that passing the exam online (especially with the new platform since May 2020) added some challenge. Since you are not allowed to sketch on a paper, it can be more difficult to work on the overall architecture. Besides, I experienced a technical issue with the platform (copy and paste were sometimes not functional on the platform. Following the examiner's advice, I had to refresh the navigator several times to be able to copy and paste the requirements which I found quite annoying for such a time constrained exam. I hope NI will address this issue. I would be interested to know if anyone has taken the exam recently and has experienced the same technical issues) I got the following results for my exam : Total grade : 63.6 Style : 8.2/10 : It seems that some data structures were not well designed which cost me points on style Documentation : 13.7/20 : The evaluation comments state that there was a lack of documentation in almost all the modules. I think that I should have spent more time documenting the block diagram than putting documentation on the typedefs that I have defined. Requirements coverage : 21.7/30 for a 72.4 % coverage. As discussed by the community, it is not enough to have all the requirements tags in your code. Architecture : 20 /40 . It seems that architecture is was costed me the most examination points. I was quite surprised since the overall architecture was more detailed than the sample exam (elevator) . Using a kind of queued message handler architecture, I went into details defining the messaging scheme. All the messages contents were typedefs. I used variants in my communication module but I documented well how this variant is converted back to data ( NI seems to not agree with this, I had a comment saying that a communication module method was not designed/documented, strange ! ) This is much more detailed than the sample exam for the elevator I think, It is really surprising to know that these sample solutions are supposed to get a nearly full grading . I had also a mention on the timing module that was not fully developed. In a sense, this is weird, aren't we supposed to not implement the algorithmic details in this exam? A timer is all but architecture in my understanding. The error handler was also considered incomplete, I guess that I had to go deeper in details and not just put a sending method in the modules. I left the inputs of this method unwired when called in the modules, I guess that was not enough for NI. The other comments about architecture stated that my modules architecture were not fully detailed. Even though I tried to follow the tip saying that you have to go in detail for some cases ( I did not handle all the buttons in a particular case structure for example ) and put a comment saying to follow this case for the others; I guess that I did not go into enough details in my implementation here too. I hope this feedback can help some of you that are willing to take the exam. Indeed, the CLA exam can be challenging since you don't know on which level of detail you should stop. Good luck ! Mourad