CCDV-F study plan

Your step-by-step plan

1. Read the blueprint against something you have built

   Day 1

   Read the exam guide's domains and skills, then walk your own most recent Claude integration against them and mark every skill you could not defend in a code review. Book a provisional exam date the same day: a fixed date is the single biggest predictor of actually sitting.

2. Build the reference application

   Week 1

   Build one small application that declares tools, runs the agentic loop by hand until the stop reason changes, streams a response, validates a structured payload, caches a stable prefix and records the prompt version and pinned model with each output. Everything later in this plan attaches to that build.

3. Go deep on Applications and Integration

   Weeks 1-2

   A third of the exam lives here, so give it a third of the time even though parts of it look like ordinary engineering. Drill requirements translation as its own exercise, make the batch-versus-realtime decision automatic, and get comfortable with caching, streaming and configuration as versioned artefacts.

4. Work the optimisation and agent blocks

   Weeks 2-3

   Take Model Selection and Optimization next, since it is the second largest block, then Agents and Workflows. Do the cost arithmetic on a real workload, learn the failure signatures that look like quality problems and are not, and be able to justify a coordinator with subagents or drop it.

5. Cover context, tools, MCP and security

   Week 3

   Separate the three output-handling steps, learn pruning against compaction against isolation by cause, rehearse the four-way selection among a built-in tool, a custom tool, a Skill and an MCP server, and apply the untrusted-input assumption to every scenario where content comes from outside your boundary.

6. Clear the two small domains in an evening

   Week 4

   Configure one repository properly for Claude Code, including a hook that actually blocks something, and spend a second sitting on error types, recovery strategies and localising a failure between the integration layer and the model output. Small weights, cheap marks, no reason to leave them.

7. Practise on scenarios, then sit a timed mock

   Weeks 4-5

   Move to full practice sets and read the explanation on every question including the ones you got right, because the marks are in knowing why a defensible option still fails the stated constraint. Use per-domain accuracy to pick what to revise, then sit at least one full timed mock and review every miss.

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