IICTI Certified Software Architect

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate quality-attribute-driven architecture and ATAM trade-off analysis, domain-driven strategic design and modular decomposition, distributed data consistency and transaction patterns and event-driven and asynchronous integration architecture, plus 7 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Software Architect.

Who it is for: Professionals working, or preparing to work, in software development roles.

1. 01Quality-attribute-driven architecture and ATAM trade-off analysis8% of the exam

   • Evaluate competing candidate architectures against prioritised quality-attribute scenarios and justify trade-offs to stakeholders.
   • Scope: ISO/IEC 25010:2023 quality model, quality-attribute scenarios and utility trees, ATAM and CBAM, sensitivity and trade-off points, architecturally significant requirements.
2. 02Domain-driven strategic design and modular decomposition13% of the exam

   • Design service and module boundaries that minimise coupling and align with domain and team structure.
   • Scope: Bounded contexts, context mapping, event storming, modular monolith versus microservices, coupling and cohesion metrics, Team Topologies and Conway's law alignment.
3. 03Distributed data consistency and transaction patterns10% of the exam

   • Architect data ownership and consistency strategies across services that meet correctness and availability requirements.
   • Scope: CAP and PACELC, consistency models, sagas (orchestration and choreography), transactional outbox, CDC with Debezium, idempotency, CRDTs and event sourcing with CQRS.
4. 04Event-driven and asynchronous integration architecture10% of the exam

   • Design resilient event-driven integration with explicit contracts, delivery guarantees and schema evolution policy.
   • Scope: Kafka, Pulsar and cloud brokers, delivery semantics and ordering, schema registries and evolution, AsyncAPI, back-pressure, dead-letter handling and API-led integration with OpenAPI and gRPC.
5. 05Resilience engineering and failure-mode architecture8% of the exam

   • Architect systems that degrade gracefully and contain blast radius under partial failure and regional outages.
   • Scope: Failure mode analysis, bulkheads, circuit breakers, timeouts and retries with jitter, load shedding, cell-based architecture, multi-region active-active, RTO/RPO design and chaos engineering.
6. 06Performance, scalability and capacity modelling11% of the exam

   • Diagnose scalability bottlenecks and model capacity to validate that an architecture meets throughput and latency targets.
   • Scope: Queueing theory and Little's law, Universal Scalability Law, tail latency, caching hierarchies, partitioning and sharding, load and soak testing, capacity forecasting.
7. 07Cloud-native platform and deployment architecture10% of the exam

   • Design a cloud-native runtime and delivery platform balancing operability, portability and cost.
   • Scope: Kubernetes and service mesh, serverless trade-offs, platform engineering and internal developer platforms, IaC with Terraform/OpenTofu, GitOps, progressive delivery and FinOps cost architecture.
8. 08Security architecture and secure-by-design11% of the exam

   • Architect security controls into system structure and evaluate designs against threat models and supply-chain risks.
   • Scope: Threat modelling (STRIDE, attack trees), zero trust per NIST SP 800-207, OAuth 2.1/OIDC, secrets and key management, supply-chain security with SLSA, SBOM and Sigstore, OWASP ASVS.
9. 09Architecture for AI-enabled and LLM-integrated systems3% of the exam

   • Design architectures that integrate ML and LLM components with controlled risk, observability and cost.
   • Scope: RAG and agent architectures, vector stores, model gateways, evaluation pipelines, guardrails, prompt-injection containment, latency and cost trade-offs, MLOps/LLMOps integration.
10. 10Evolutionary architecture, fitness functions and modernisation8% of the exam

    • Lead incremental modernisation of legacy systems using automated architectural governance to prevent erosion.
    • Scope: Fitness functions, ArchUnit-style conformance testing, strangler fig and branch-by-abstraction, technical debt quantification, legacy migration and data migration strategies.
11. 11Architecture decision governance and documentation8% of the exam

    • Lead architecture decision-making and communicate rationale and views that remain traceable and current.
    • Scope: ADRs and decision logs, C4 model and arc42, ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 viewpoints, architecture review boards, lightweight governance and alignment with TOGAF and enterprise roadmaps.

Question types

Single choice 100%

Delivery

Online (remote proctored), Test centre, On-site (corporate)

Retakes

Up to three attempts within any 12-month period. A 14-day waiting period applies after a first unsuccessful attempt and 30 days after a second. Each retake requires a new booking and fee. Retakes draw a different randomised form from the question bank.

Provisional cut score — psychometric validation is required before live delivery. Blueprint v1.0.

1. 1

   Register

   Create a free account and start the programme.

2. 2

   Practice

   Online practice test (coming soon).

3. 3

   Training

   Optional

   Online course or classroom — or skip it.

4. 4

   Certification

   Independent exam and certification decision.

Training is optional and does not by itself confer certification. Find a training partner