Exam 70-498 : Delivering Continuous Value with Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management

 

I finally got the time to go and write the “Delivering Continuous Value with Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management” exam.

I was quite nervous about this one, as it has been a while since I have written any form of exam and because it is very “non technical” focussed. These “fuzzy” questions can often be very misleading.

Luckily I passed, fairly well actually, so I thought I would jot down some of my crib notes..

1) Know the TFS process templates

Especially the terminology and the artefacts that are included in the different process templates. The questions are almost a matter of disqualifying the incorrect answers and then you are left with what can only be the correct ones.

2) Have a good grasp on the methodologies / processes

Especially scrum! The scrum guide is a fairly concise guide and small enough to read in one sitting (even for me!), so there is no real reason not to work through it in any case.

Once again, have a good grasp of the CMMI, Agile and Scrum terminology, artefacts and processes.

3) Read

I really recommend “Professional Scrum Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012” by Richard Hundhausen. Even if you are not going to take the exam, a very good read indeed.

Have a look online, there are a lot of brain dumps available for this exam. I would take a look at the questions, but really scrutinise the answers. I looked over a couple and there are definitely plenty of wrong answers provided to the questions. Just be careful and don't learn the answers of by heart!

4) Work through the free jumpstart

Yes, there is actually a free jumpstart for this exam. Definitely worth spending some time on.

 

Done and dusted!

Good luck if you are going to give it a go.

Missing Transcripts

I wrote the 70-512 exam more than 7 South African working days ago and it has still not appeared on my transcript. Getting a bit worried about that one, so I phoned the help full people at Microsoft. It appears as if the exam was never uploaded to Microsoft from Prometric, they are going to investigate and hopefully upload it manually. I hope that there are no issues surrounding this.

Will have to wait and see.

MCTS : TFS 2010 here I come..

woo-hoo wrote the 70-512 exam and passed it.... I was a bit concerned about the depth of knowledge needed etc, but after taking advice and working through the TFS Admin (one of those tortuously long detailed guides) and TFS Install documents. In addition to a fair degree of working experience it seemed to be good enough :)...

Having this exam under my belt should provide me with the MCTS for TFS 2010 administration. First check box for the ALM competency checked....