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BCS Practitioner Certificate in Systems Development Essentials — Requirements & Free Practice

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BCS Practitioner Certificate in Systems Development Essentials

Professional certification covering systems development lifecycles, methods, investigation, modelling interpretation and quality assurance.

Licensing authority: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

Initial by examination
BCS Practitioner Certificate in Systems Development Essentials
Adjustments
Reasonable adjustments follow BCS policy; the Examination Provider decides eligibility and retains a record subject to BCS audit.
Applicability
Current product page adopts v2.5; its December 2016 publication is not asserted as an exact official effective date. No current retirement date was established from the actual retrieved originals.
Assessment
Pass the scenario-based written open-book examination at 50%; one hour plus 15 minutes reading time, supervised/invigilated, paper based in the adopted syllabus.
Booking
Arrange with an accredited provider; training-provider search is linked by the current product page. No specific seat, on-demand date, Pearson account requirement or OnVUE delivery is established for this examination by the generic BCS programme page.
Language
English only in this task. Non-native/official-language candidates have 25% extra time and may use their own paper translation dictionary; electronic dictionaries are prohibited.
Method
Examination Providers select the specific method and set questions for that method; sections 5-9 are covered in its light.
Preparation
Self-study or training with an Examination Provider; training is recommended rather than mandatory, with at least 21 study hours over at least three days when a course is taken.
Prerequisites
None; candidates should possess appropriate knowledge to meet the syllabus objectives.

BCS Practitioner Certificate in Systems Development Essentials

Provider
BCS-accredited Examination Provider
Format
Supervised/invigilated, paper-based, open-book written examination based on a business scenario; provider-selected method; model construction is excluded.
Time limit
1 hour plus 15 minutes reading time; 25% additional time when the examination language is not the candidate's native/official language, subject to the syllabus provisions.
Passing score
50%
Examination outline
  • System Development roles and responsibilities (10%)
    • Actors, roles and responsibilities in system development and implementation
    • Characteristics of these roles
    • Team structure
  • Architecture (5%)
    • Different levels of architecture
    • Inputs at Enterprise level
    • Inputs at Solution and Infrastructure level
    • Impacts of design decisions
  • Systems Development Lifecycles (15%)
    • Waterfall
    • V Model
    • Incremental or phased delivery
    • Spiral or iterative
    • Advantages and disadvantages of each approach
    • Selection of an appropriate approach on defined characteristics
  • Development Practices (10%)
    • Bespoke development
    • Evolutionary / Agile
    • Prototyping
    • Component based development
    • Software Package solutions (COTS Commercial off-the-shelf)
  • Methods (20%)
    • Structure and content of a chosen representative method
    • Describe and interpret three representation models from the method
    • Logical and physical aspects depicted by these models
    • Roles and team structures within the chosen method
    • Products within a chosen method
  • Systems Investigation (10%)
    • Fact finding approaches
    • Functional requirements definition
    • Non-functional requirements definition
    • Documenting system requirements
    • Human aspects of systems investigation and introducing change
  • System Design, Deployment and Maintenance (10%)
    • Controls and security
    • Verification and validation
    • Interface design
    • Design principles and constraints (legal, ethical, financial)
    • Different types of implementation
    • Sign off and deployment
    • Post implementation reviews
    • Different types of maintenance and support
  • Quality Assurance (15%)
    • Definitions of quality
    • Requirements driven testing
    • Types of walkthrough and inspection
    • Post Project Reviews
    • Service Level Agreements
  • CASE, CAST, Application Lifecycle Management tools (5%)
    • Software support for systems development
    • Features of CASE and CAST tools
    • Features of Application Lifecycle Management
    • Lifecycle coverage
    • Configuration and version control
Examination sources