My SAP Fiori Certifications Experience (C_SAPXIMP_20 and C_FIORDEV_20)

TL;DR;

How was my experience to get both SAP Fiori Certifications (C_SAPXIMP_20 and C_FIORDEV_20) and the differences between them…

Let’s go straight to business and after we can talk about other stuff…

You might have noticed there are two SAP Fiori Certifications:

• SAP Certified Technology Associate – SAP Fiori Implementation and Configuration (C_SAPXIMP_20)
• SAP Certified Development Associate – SAP Fiori Application Developer (C_FIORDEV_20)

C_SAPXIMP_20 – SAP Fiori Implementation and Configuration

As the name suggests, it’s only about configuration! You won’t see any code here, no JavaScript at all. This certification could fit both ABAP and Basis people.

You’ll answer questions about the setup for SAP Gateway, PFCG roles, SAP Fiori Launchpad, etc. Also, questions about Fiori app types (Transactional, Factsheet and Analytical) and Fiori architecture. Do not bother studying code, focus on setup and architecture, this exam is all about it.

If you have a lot of experience on SAP Fiori/SAP Gateway implementation/configuration, this exam should be easy for you, you won’t need to study toooooooo much. If you have no experience, but you’ve studied enough, you’ll be able to pass this certification. I’ve seen people getting certified with ZERO experience, people who NEVER create a Catalog before. Those guys dedicated a lot of time on studying!

IMO, this exam is pretty easy. The questions are not complex and most of them are quite obvious. But, yes, few questions will try to trick you, just pay attention…

C_FIORDEV_20 – SAP Fiori Application Developer

This certification was released on April/2017, if I’m not mistaken. It’s brand new and it was made for developers… with more than just UI5 coding skills…

I thought this certification would be easy. I was confident. I’ve created so many custom Fiori apps before. “This one won’t take long”, how wrong I was… After the 5 first questions I started to think “F#ck!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m going to fail!!!”.

The first topic was all about Design Thinking and UX. After this, the topic was Fiori strategy and guidelines and I started to breath again…

This certification is super complete! It’ll test all the skills that someone who puts “SAP Fiori Developer” on his Linkedin profile should know. It has tons of questions about OData, data binding and UI5 extensibility. You’ll see some questions about cloud and SAP Web IDE (which I don’t use, I prefer another IDE). Also, there are questions about SAPUI5 framework, its bootstraps and libraries, some code snippets to read and say what’s going on there. Ah, get ready to answer questions about HAT and Kapsel plugins you have never used before! There was even a question about creating a custom SAP Fiori Client!

The best and most surprising topic was testing! This part was really clever and I believe it’s going to be the toughest one for ABAPers who are playing with Fiori now. An average ABAPer has never written an unit test in his life! Let alone javascript tests with QUnit + OPA5. The exam has questions about the concept and pieces of code to be examined.

Despite I’ve loved this certification, I gotta say something. The official documentation and samples for the exam have a lot of issues! It might be because it’s a new certification, maybe it hasn’t passed by the same amount of reviews as the others. But the fact is: there are issues which will mislead people!!!

For instance, take the official exam sample. Question 10.

It says OPA5 offers the following test options: Development tests and Load tests. But it isn’t true!!! It’s wrong!!! OPA5 offers Navigation tests and User Interaction test!

Have a look at the OPA5 page! “This makes OPA especially helpful for testing user interactions, integration with OpenUI5 , navigation, and data binding.”

You’ll find more of this in the books UX402/UX410/etc.

The official documentation makes you sick sometimes… They say all the time we should consider SAPUI version 1.38 for the exam. In one chapter they are talking about manifest.json and stuff from SAPUI5 ~1.38 and in the next one they use all examples from SAPUI5 1.28v which DOES NOT have manifest.json and handles routers in a totally different way. Getting you totally confused, if you aren’t used to those changes.

I wrote this blog to share my journey to be SAP Fiori Certified. I hope it helps some people to decide which exam they should take and to get a glimpse of what is waiting for them…

How do I prepared myself to both exams? SAP Learning Hub! I checked the certifications’ content on the official page and I spent more time on the most important topics. I created lots of SAPUI5/OpenUI5 apps for customers and just for fun, to practice some new skill or a different control…

I also published 2 OpenUI5 custom libraries to be used by the community. You can check them on the OpenUI5 related projects page: http://openui5.org/relatedProjects.html

I know… I have to invest some time to write a better README file and a blog post for them…

I hope you have enjoyed it and let me know the results if you decide to take the exam   🙂

PS: yes, I spent more time looking for memes than writing the blog…