ASDEV01 exam - How difficult it is and what to study?

[amydozier]

For those who have taken the ASDEV01 exam, how did you find the difficulty level and what areas should I focus on the most?

[Michael_S]

Summoning our resident certification expert, @devneetmohanty07!

[devneetmohanty07]

@Michael_S - Thanks for tagging me on this post! 

@amydozier - I would say that the exam should be comparatively much easier than AD-01 and it requires one to be acquainted with the basics of using Blue Prism Studio tool. The questions that you can expect most would be coming from the following topics:

• Building basic process flows - Multiple questions with diagrams can come where they can ask you what would be the output or if any stage is incorrectly setup. I would advice to go through each and every stage and how they function in both Process and Object Studio.
  
  
• Objects - You should be well acquainted with application modeler, basic attributes that should be relevant for most of the elements. Consider the following spying modes while you prepare: Win32, UIA, AA and Browser. Also, be familiar with Navigate, Write and Read stage and what all actions and relevant properties can be used with different element types (Global Send Keys, Global Send Key Events, Global Mouse Click, Global Mouse Click Center, Activate Application, Is Connected, Attach, Detach, Launch, Terminate)
  
  
• Datatypes & Calculation Functions: You should be familiar with the calculation stage pretty well so that you can use various functions. I would mainly stress on learning the text, date, logic and exception categorical functions (ExceptionDetail, ExceptionType, AND, OR, True, False, =, <>, >, <, >=, <=, &, InStr, Mid, Len, Lower, Upper, StartsWith, EndsWith, Replace, Right, Left, NewLine, Trim, TrimStart, TrimEnd, DateAdd, DateDiff, AddDays, AddMonths, FormatDate, FormatDateTime, MakeDate, MakeDateTime, MakeTimeSpan, Now, Today, LocalTime, UTCTime) - This section would be all about practice so my recommendation is go through the help document and practice on all of these functions. This section can have questions that can be quite tricky so carefully read each question and spot for any mistakes in the expressions before even thinking of how they can be solved.
  
  
• Exception Handling: This section is by far one of the most important one not only from examination purpose but from a practical point of view as well. You need to know how the process flows and breaks with every exception stage. One important thing to remember is how Resume and Recover works in different situations and how Throw and Rethrow should be setup properly. You will get mostly questions which would be diagram based and you need to spot errors if any in those diagrams or simply state the execution result.
  
  
• Work Queues: For this exam, I won't say there would be much complicated questions from work queues so just understand basics of why they are used and how do we add items, get items and use different properties like setting status, tags and priority. Also, how do these properties help eventually.
  
  
• Debugging: This section can be quite tricky as you need to imagine how a process would work while you Step, Step Into or Step Over. Practical experience is required here, so I would say build some workflows and know the basics over the differences between these methods. Also, know why and how breakpoints are used. Important thing to remember is this section will have questions with Exception Handling so you need to practice some diagrams while putting Recover and Resume stages in main page and sub pages to see how each of the stepping method behave.
  
  
• Credential: This is a relatively easy and simple section which just needs you to know how to setup credential and fetch the values in a process flow using the Credential internal business object. Just go through the tutorial and it should be more than enough.

All in all to conclude, the examination is not tough at all, just needs a bit of practical exposure and you need to be very careful while you read the questions to spot mistakes. I wish you all the very best for your exams and excited to see you passing the same with flying colors!

[Michael_S]

Wow, what a response @devneetmohanty07! Thank you so much 💙