Certified LabVIEW Developer (CLD) Exam

After you have successfully achieved CLAD certification, you are eligible to take the CLD exam, the second level of LabVIEW certification. The test is a practical exam, having questions that require you to create LabVIEW VIs that demonstrate your proficiency, knowledge, and skills to design, develop, and deploy scalable, readable, and maintainable LabVIEW applications. You are expected to know and use advanced software principles, architectures, techniques, and the LabVIEW Development Guidelines.

You can prepare for the CLD exam by doing the following:

• Pass the CLAD exam (required).
  
  
• Take the LabVIEW Fundamentals Exam (see the previous section) again to make sure you remember the CLAD material.
  
  
• Make sure that you have read and completed the activities in the Advanced section of LabVIEW for Everyone (Chapters 10 through 17) and have paid close attention to areas with CLD topic callouts (with a CLD icon in the margin like the one shown on the left).
  
  

  

• Take the CLD Sample Exam (CLD Sample Exam.pdf is located in the CERTIFICATION folder of the CD-ROM).
  
  
• Take the LabVIEW Intermediate I and Intermediate II training courses offered by National Instruments and NI Certified Training Facilities.
  
  

You absolutely must practice for the CLD exam by taking the practice teststhere is no better way to ensure that you are ready. You must be able to complete these practical exercises within the required time frame (four hours). One thing that will help you enormously is knowing how to create and use a state machine (SM) or queued message handler (QMH), as discussed in Chapter 13, "Advanced LabVIEW Structures and Functions."

Practice creating and using the SM and QMH structures. Memorize their components and practice creating these structures from scratch, purely from memory. (You won't be able to bring your copy of LabVIEW for Everyone or any example VIs with you to the exam, so you had better know how to create these from memory.) Time yourself to see how quickly you can create a SM or QMH "template"it shouldn't take you more than five or ten minutes. When you sit down to take the CLD exam, the first thing you should do (after reading the exam question) is create a SM or QSM template for use during the exam. Save a copy of it before starting to work on the exam, just in case you decide to start over. Back up your work regularly, in case you have computer problems.