I just passed the Salesforce Lifecycle & Deployment Architect exam in August 2022. Overall is was probably the easiest Architect exam I have taken so far, and one where much of the subject matter was casually absorbed by me through my career rather than deliberate study. Going through the trailhead is also more helpful than usual for the Architect exams.
As an Architect, it is important to understand how to accomodate multiple streams of work as well as upcoming Salesforce Major Releases within the limited Sandbox environments you have at your disposal. Major work almost always has to be scheduled with respect to sandbox availability against other projects. Ultimately it may come down to you explain exactly why the business should spend significant licensing on new sandboxes rather than coordinate within the sandboxes that you have.
The exam is however more the sandbox management, and understanding that your teams have many development approaches to each Org and customer is important, as is choosing the right one.
My observations were:
- IT Project lifecycle — You really need real life experience working with Agile and general IT projects — you could just study the theory of project management types, however I think that you will struggle with some of these questions
- You do not need to practice building packages (managed, unlocked, 2GP etc). Just reading the Salesforce documentation around package approaches is easy enough
- Some technical knowledge is required, such as understanding the Tooling and Metadata API’s. This is however only a fraction of the overall questions, so you could in theory fail all of these and still pass
- Know your sandbox limitations and refresh timings! Very important since a simple limitation can rule out possible answers very quickly, but again not hard to learn by heart
- Sandbox deployment strategies — I have never personally provisioned/refreshed a sandbox or deployed to Salesforce Production in my life — and suspect I never will — but it is really important to observe and understand what your team is doing with these environment management activities
