- What This Domain Outline Covers (and What It Doesn't)
- The Six Domains and Their Weights at a Glance
- Domain 1: Application Development (30%)
- Domain 2: Case Management (20%)
- Domain 3: Data and Integration (20%)
- Domain 4: User Experience (5%)
- Domain 5: System Administration (15%)
- Domain 6: Security (10%)
- How Questions Are Delivered Across the Domains
- Sequencing Your Preparation by Domain Weight
- Exam Mechanics That Affect Your Domain Strategy
- Frequently Asked Questions
- The Platform '25 exam (PEGACPSSA25V1) uses six official domains, not the eight-domain outline from the Platform '24.2 version.
- Application Development carries 30%; Case Management and Data and Integration each carry 20%, together making up 70% of the exam.
- User Experience is only 5%, but System Administration (15%) and Security (10%) combine to a quarter of your score.
- The exam has 60 questions in 90 minutes with a 70% passing score; the fee is USD 190 per attempt.
What This Domain Outline Covers (and What It Doesn't)
This guide breaks down the six content areas of the Certified Pega Senior System Architect exam for Pega Platform '25, exam code PEGACPSSA25V1. On this site we use the abbreviation CSSA for the credential, and everything below refers specifically to that Pega Senior System Architect certification. If you are new to the credential itself, start with What Is CSSA Certification? and then return here for the domain-level detail.
One caution before diving in: Pega has published different domain outlines for different platform versions. The earlier Platform '24.2 exam (PEGACPSSA24V1) uses an eight-domain structure. The six domains and percentages in this article are the official exam objectives for the Platform '25 version, and you should not blend the two outlines when building a study plan. Likewise, do not confuse this exam with the System Architect or Lead System Architect examinations, which test different scopes at different levels of responsibility.
The Six Domains and Their Weights at a Glance
The weights below are the official objective percentages for the exam, not an allocation derived from a course. They tell you where the points are, which should drive how many hours each topic earns.
| Domain | Weight | Character of the Domain |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Application Development | 30% | Broadest and most heavily tested; rule design, reuse, and configuration decisions |
| 2. Case Management | 20% | Case lifecycle design, stages, processes, and work routing |
| 3. Data and Integration | 20% | Data modeling, data access, and connecting to external systems |
| 4. User Experience | 5% | Smallest domain; interface configuration and presentation choices |
| 5. System Administration | 15% | Operating, deploying, and troubleshooting applications |
| 6. Security | 10% | Authentication, authorization, and protecting applications and data |
On a 60-question exam, the weights imply roughly 18 questions from Application Development, about 12 each from Case Management and Data and Integration, about 9 from System Administration, about 6 from Security, and about 3 from User Experience. Treat those as approximations: Pega does not publish an exact per-domain question count, so the percentages are guidance rather than a guaranteed blueprint.
Domain 1: Application Development (30%)
This is the heart of the exam. Nearly a third of your score depends on how well you understand how Pega applications are structured, extended, and maintained. At the senior level, the questions shift from "which rule type does this" toward "which design is the most maintainable given these constraints."
Application Development: What Candidates Must Understand
Senior-level questions in this domain typically present a business or technical requirement and ask you to choose the best configuration approach, often with several plausible answers.
- Application structure, including how layers and rulesets organize and version rules
- Class structure and inheritance, and how rule resolution selects which rule runs
- Reuse strategies: specialization, circumstancing, and when each is appropriate
- Decision logic: choosing between decision tables, decision trees, when rules, and declarative approaches
- Declarative rules and how they recalculate or react to changes in data
- Reporting design and building reports that perform well
- Debugging and diagnosing unexpected rule behavior using the tools available in the platform
The Concepts That Separate Pass from Fail
Rule resolution is the single most important mechanism to internalize. Many scenario questions ultimately reduce to "which rule will the system actually pick, and why?" If you can reason about class hierarchy, ruleset version, circumstancing, and availability together, you can eliminate wrong answers quickly. Questions in this area often include a distractor that sounds reasonable but ignores how resolution works.
The second theme is design judgment. Senior candidates are expected to prefer approaches that reduce duplication and make future changes cheap. When two answers both "work," the better one usually promotes reuse, avoids hard-coded values, and uses the declarative or configurable option the platform already provides.
Domain 2: Case Management (20%)
Case Management is where Pega's identity as a case-centric platform shows up on the exam. This domain tests whether you can model real business work as cases and design how that work flows through its lifecycle.
Case Management: What Candidates Must Understand
Expect scenario questions that describe a business process and ask how to model it using case types, stages, and processes.
- Case type design: stages, steps, and how to represent the business lifecycle
- Parent and child cases, and when to spin off related work
- Process design, including flows, assignments, and decision shapes
- Routing and assignment: how work reaches the right person or queue
- Service levels and urgency: how deadlines and escalation are configured
- Case data and how information is made available across the lifecycle
- Alternate stages and handling exceptions or changes in the normal path
Thinking in Stages Rather Than Flows
A common weakness among candidates who came up through earlier certifications is defaulting to flow-level thinking. The senior exam rewards you for starting from the case lifecycle and stages, then drilling down into processes only where needed. When a question asks how to restructure a case that has grown unwieldy, the answer often involves reorganizing stages, introducing child cases, or using existing case-level features rather than adding more custom logic.
Routing and service-level questions tend to be precise. Know the differences between the available routing options and what each guarantees, because answers are often distinguished by a single behavioral detail.
Domain 3: Data and Integration (20%)
This domain matches Case Management at 20% and is often where candidates with strong rule-building experience feel less confident. It covers how an application models data, gets it from where it lives, and exchanges it with other systems.
Data and Integration: What Candidates Must Understand
This area blends data modeling with connectivity decisions, and the questions often hinge on picking the right pattern for a given source and requirement.
- Data model design: data types, relationships, and how data is structured and reused
- Data pages: sourcing, scope, refresh strategy, and why they are central to data access
- Connecting to external systems using connectors and services
- Choosing between synchronous and asynchronous integration approaches
- Mapping and transforming data between internal and external formats
- Handling integration errors and building resilient connections
- Using responses from external systems in case processing
Data Pages Are the Connective Tissue
If you master one concept in this domain, make it data pages. They show up in questions about performance, freshness of information, scoping, and how an application reaches a system of record. Many integration scenarios are really data page scenarios in disguise: what scope should this data have, when should it refresh, and what should happen when the source is unavailable?
For integration, the exam tends to test judgment about fit rather than syntax. Given a requirement such as near-real-time lookups versus batch exchange, you should be able to say which style is appropriate and why.
Domain 4: User Experience (5%)
User Experience is the smallest domain, and that should shape how much time you give it. It is worth about three questions on a 60-question exam, so you can reasonably approach it as a targeted review rather than a deep study block.
User Experience: What Candidates Must Understand
Focus on configuring interfaces that are consistent, reusable, and appropriate to the situation.
- Building and reusing sections and layouts to avoid duplicating interface configuration
- Controlling visibility, required fields, and read-only behavior
- Validation and how users are guided toward correct input
- Choosing appropriate presentation for the data and task at hand
- Keeping interface behavior consistent across the application
Do not skip it entirely, because a handful of easy points is still worth taking. But resist the temptation to polish this domain at the expense of the heavier ones. Review it late in your preparation, once the major domains are solid.
Domain 5: System Administration (15%)
System Administration contributes 15%, which is more than User Experience and Security would each suggest on their own. This domain looks at how applications are deployed, maintained, monitored, and diagnosed, and it rewards candidates with hands-on operational experience.
System Administration: What Candidates Must Understand
Think about the lifecycle of an application after it is built: moving it between environments, keeping it healthy, and finding out why something went wrong.
- Moving applications between environments and managing application packaging
- Understanding how the platform runs background and scheduled processing
- Monitoring application health and reviewing system logs and alerts
- Diagnosing performance problems and identifying likely causes
- Managing configuration that differs across environments
- Maintaining rules and applications over time as versions evolve
Why Candidates Underestimate This Domain
Developers who spend their days configuring rules sometimes treat administration as someone else's job. The exam does not. Roughly nine questions come from this area, and they are rarely answerable by guesswork. If you have never worked through a deployment or investigated a performance issue, find a way to practice those tasks in a sandbox so the scenarios feel familiar.
Domain 6: Security (10%)
Security accounts for 10%, or roughly six questions. The domain covers who can get into an application and what they are allowed to do once inside, plus how sensitive data is protected.
Security: What Candidates Must Understand
Questions here usually describe an access requirement and ask which configuration achieves it with the least exposure.
- Authentication: how users and systems prove who they are
- Authorization: access groups, roles, and the privileges that determine what users can do
- Controlling access to specific cases, data, and operations
- Protecting sensitive information within the application
- Applying the principle of least privilege when granting access
- Understanding how security checks interact with rule execution
Security questions often hinge on a single configuration detail, such as which setting actually gates access. Read each scenario carefully for what is being protected and from whom, and prefer the narrowest permission that satisfies the requirement.
How Questions Are Delivered Across the Domains
The exam contains 60 questions to be answered in 90 minutes. Pega lists several possible question types: single-response multiple choice, multiple-response multiple choice, matching or drag-and-drop, and reading-passage or scenario questions. The distribution across those types is not specified for this version, so do not assume a particular mix.
- Single-response questions: choose the one best answer; common for rule-resolution and configuration-choice questions.
- Multiple-response questions: select every correct option; read carefully for how many answers are expected.
- Matching and drag-and-drop: pair concepts, rules, or steps; useful for testing whether you know which feature fits which need.
- Scenario and reading-passage questions: a short business context followed by a decision; these are most common in Case Management and Data and Integration.
The exam is closed book. For a deeper look at how demanding this format feels in practice, see How Hard Is the CSSA Exam?. And because Pega does not provide official practice certification exams, any practice material you use, including mission quizzes and independent question banks, should be treated as study support rather than a preview of real exam questions. You can find domain-organized practice on our CSSA practice test site.
Sequencing Your Preparation by Domain Weight
You do not need a generic study framework here; you need an order of attack that follows the weights. Pega's own preparation pathway for this credential is the Senior System Architect mission, which is the issuer's recommended route. The sketch below layers a sensible sequence on top of that pathway. For a fuller plan, see the CSSA Study Guide.
Application Development
- Work through rule resolution, class structure, and reuse until you can predict which rule runs
- Practice decision logic and declarative behavior hands-on
Case Management, then Data and Integration
- Model a case lifecycle in stages, including parent and child cases and routing
- Build and refresh data pages; practice connecting to an external source
System Administration and Security
- Rehearse deployment, monitoring, and diagnostic tasks
- Configure authentication, access groups, and least-privilege roles
User Experience and Full Review
- Quick pass through interface reuse and validation
- Revisit weak areas, weighted toward the 70% held by the top three domains
The reasoning is simple: start with the domain that carries the most points and underpins the others, finish with the smallest, and reserve the last stretch for gap-filling. If you want a compact reference near the end, the CSSA Cheat Sheet condenses the must-know facts into one page.
Exam Mechanics That Affect Your Domain Strategy
A few logistics shape how you should approach the domains. The passing score is 70%, and note that this is a score threshold, not a pass rate; no official pass rate was found in the reviewed sources. If you are curious about what is and isn't known, see CSSA Pass Rate: What the Data Shows and CSSA Passing Score.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Exam code | PEGACPSSA25V1 (Pega Platform '25) |
| Questions and time | 60 questions, 90 minutes |
| Passing score | 70% |
| Fee | USD 190 per attempt plus applicable taxes, subject to change |
| Delivery | Pearson VUE test centers or OnVUE remote proctoring |
| Languages | English and Japanese |
| Prerequisite | Certified Pega System Architect in any version |
Ninety minutes for 60 questions gives you roughly a minute and a half per question, which is comfortable for single-response items but tighter for lengthy scenarios. Plan to move quickly through the straightforward questions so you can spend real time on multi-part scenarios in the heavier domains. For eligibility specifics, read CSSA Requirements, and for the money side see CSSA Certification Cost.
Pega also states that certifications currently do not expire, though this is subject to change and the company reserves the right to impose recertification requirements. Check Pega Academy for the current position when you register.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Platform '25 exam (PEGACPSSA25V1) has six official domains: Application Development, Case Management, Data and Integration, User Experience, System Administration, and Security. The earlier Platform '24.2 exam used an eight-domain outline, which should not be mixed with this one.
Application Development is the largest at 30%. Case Management and Data and Integration follow at 20% each, so these three domains together account for 70% of the exam.
It is risky to skip it completely, since it still represents a few questions worth easy points. But because it is the smallest domain, a brief targeted review late in your preparation is usually sufficient compared with the heavier domains.
No. Pega does not provide official practice certification exams and does not endorse third-party preparation materials. Mission quizzes and independent practice questions are study aids and should not be treated as actual certification questions.
Yes. The prerequisite is Certified Pega System Architect in any version. See CSSA Requirements for the full eligibility picture, and Is the CSSA Certification Worth It? if you are weighing whether to pursue it.