Perforce Administrator Exam

About the Exam

Anyone who takes this exam already should have relevant hands-on experience in Perforce administration. If you would like to brush up on concepts before taking the exam, see Preparing for the Exam for sample questions, tips, and helpful pointers to available documentation and training resources. 

Exam Format

The exam is organized as follows:

• Online web-based exam consisting of 60 questions.
• Maximum time allowed for the exam is 120 minutes.
• The exam is open book. You should know the basic answers to questions and, during the exam, you may look up information to research your answers.
• Exam questions are grouped by topic. Each topic is associated with a pool of questions. At least one question is randomly chosen from each topic pool.
• All questions are multiple choice types. Most questions are multiple choice/single answer, while some are multiple choice/multiple answer.
• All questions are weighted equally. No partial credit is given for multiple answer questions.
• There is no negative score for answering a question incorrectly. 

Passing the Exam

The minimum score required to pass is 65%. Upon passing the exam, you will be mailed your Perforce Administrator Exam certificate. We will add your opt-in contact information to a public directory listing of Perforce Administrators who have passed the exam.

How to Enroll

If you are ready to take the exam, follow these steps:

• Create an account in the Perforce Training Portal.
• Register for the exam.
• Pay the exam fee of $150, payable by credit card.*

Enroll Now

Preparing for the Exam

You should be familiar with the most recent version of Perforce products. Here are some resources to help you prepare for the exam. 

Exam Preparation Materials

You should be well acquainted with most of the information found in the following materials:

• P4 User's Guide [PDF]
• Perforce Command Reference [PDF]
• Perforce System Administrator's Guide [PDF]
• Perforce Knowledge Base Articles
  • Admin Tasks
  • Hardware, OS, & Network Reference
  • P4/P4D Reference
• Perforce White Papers
• Practical Perforce by Laura Wingerd (O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2006)

You may also wish to set up a test Perforce Server to run and verify commands while taking the exam.

• Free download of the Perforce Server
• Setup instructions for the Perforce Sample Depot 

Perforce Training

If you feel you need more formal guidance, the following instructor-led courses available from Perforce and Perforce Certified Trainers will also help you prepare for the Perforce Administrator Exam:

• Introduction to Perforce for Users
• Introduction to Perforce for Administrators
• Perforce Best Practices for Codeline Management
• Scripting Perforce

For more information on these and other courses, please visit Perforce Training. 

Exam Topics

The exam questions span several topic areas that Perforce administrators typically encounter in the course of their work. Although you may use reference materials during this open-book exam, the time constraint for taking the exam assumes familiarity with the following topics and concepts.

The exam covers: 

• Perforce Command-Line Client (P4)
• Administration GUI (P4V)
• Backup and recovery
• Distributed development
• External system integration
• General administration and maintenance
• High availability and disaster recovery
• Installation
• Performance
• Scripting
• Security
• Triggers
• Troubleshooting
• User support:
  • Branching and merging
  • Changelists
  • Client workspaces
  • File types and operations
  • Jobs
  • Labels 

You should also be familiar with the latest versions of the following Perforce components:

• P4/P4D
• P4V/P4Admin
• P4Broker   

Contact Us

If you have further questions about the exam, please email us at training@perforce.com.

Sample Questions

To help you gauge your readiness for the exam, here are some representative sample questions and their answers.

Question: A Perforce server running on Linux cannot be run in case-insensitive mode.

	1) True
	2) False

Question: Why would a refresh merge (usually performed with 'p4 resolve -am') be performed immediately before a promotion merge ('p4 resolve -at')? Select all that apply.

	1) To ensure the lower stability branch contains all changes in the higher stability branch.
	2) If a merge is run without first performing 'p4 resolve -am', Perforce will not detect indirect branch ancestry.
	3) 'p4 resolve -at' grants complete merge credit on both the source and target branches, so any unintegrated revisions on the target branch in future integrations would be missed.
	4) 'p4 resolve -at' skips cherry-picked revisions unless accounted for first by running p4 resolve -am.

*Refund Policy

If you change your mind about taking the exam, you may request a refund only if you have not started taking the exam. Email training@perforce.com and include your

• Original transaction ID number
• Card type
• Last four digits of the credit card used
• Card expiration date

We will process your request and issue a refund within 10 business days for the full amount.