Salesforce Certified Technical Architect - Part 2 Exam

This weekend I cleared the Salesforce Technical Architect certification part 2 exam and wanted to share my experience along with some tips and tricks. First of all, it's a great exam to take because of the breadth and depth of topics covered. As a technical architect you work on a number of areas over the years such as requirements gap analysis, technical architecture, design and development, deployments, data migrations, performance tuning and troubleshooting, SSO, Web Services, SSL, firewalls, etc. and in preparing for the exam you will need to recollect a lot of that experience and something like remembering the difference between 2nd and 3rd normal forms can come in quite handy (if you are wondering what are "normal forms", then you have some studying to do :) 

Now, if you are just starting to prepare then the first place to look of course is the official Study Guide and especially Section 5: Recommended Training and References. One of the first things recommended there is the Dev 401 training and if you are pursuing the Architect certification you must have cleared the Dev 401 exam and should be well aware of the basics anyway. If you happen to be Dev 501 certified (or trained) it's certainly beneficial but you don't have to be and having hands-on experience working with Apex and Visualforce will do just fine. Integration is another key area and the Dev 502 training I'm sure is quite useful but you can also refer to the online documentation and get enough information. Again, hands-on experience is a must because there were several questions around integration that required a lot of thought to answer. The rest of the resources refer to either online courses, webinars or technical articles - all of which are very good to know and highly recommended. 

The next section in the guide - Section 6: Exam Outline - is IMO the most important section that you need to focus on. If you can read through the objectives and feel like yeah ok I get this, then you are in good shape. If you are not aware of some of the concepts, then try to focus on those depending on how much weight is assigned. For example a fourth of the exam is about Platform Architecture concepts - which means you should know about a broad range of concepts and details around Salesforce and force.com Platform, such as how force.com multi-tenant architecture works, what are the different types of licenses and their nuances, the differences between going with a single-org or multi-org strategy, large data volume considerations, i18n capabilities, etc. If you have read through this section of the guide, my recommendation is, please re-read it and make sure you understand _every_ one of the objectives. 

The exam is 60 questions, multiple choice and you have two hours to complete. Most of the questions are quite long (6-8 sentences) and for a majority of them you have to choose 2 or 3 correct options out of 5. I would say the questions where you have to choose 3 correct answers are relatively easy compared to the ones where you had 2 correct choices because it is easier to eliminate the two wrong ones than to pick two right ones. A good number of them required re-reading the question and choices several (>3) times, the rest I was able to get through mostly in one speed reading (or two). I was stumped on very few (say 3 or 4) because they were quite specific and I just didn't know the answer and ended up guessing (I checked them after I got home and sure enough I had them all wrong :) 

Also you have to keep an eye on the clock because time just flies. I got through only about 7 or 8 questions in the first 25 minutes (ramp up time I guess!) but still managed to finish the exam with around 15 mins to spare and review some answers. So the key is if you have to re-read a question and still can't figure out the choices its best to just mark it for review and come back to it at the end. Otherwise you might miss out on some easy ones. The other thing is when you are stuck between two choices the answer is usually based on one or two key words in the question so you might have to just review it quickly again. Also be sure to read ALL the choices (especially for the one or two correct choices) as there can be subtle differences in the choices. I say this because I didn't find any question to be ambiguous and felt pretty comfortable with my answer choices after I reviewed them. Overall it was a good experience and wasn't as bad as I had expected. 

Good luck with the preparation!

UPDATE: Refer to the follow up post for references to the study materials.