PeopleCert DevOps-Foundation PeopleCert DevOps Foundationv3.6Exam Exam Practice Test

Epics deliveredis asoftware/process metric, not a business performance metric.

Business performance metricsinclude financial and market indicators: earnings, cashflow, market share, revenue growth.

Why not the others?

Earnings, Cashflow, Marketshare:Directly tied to business health.

Extract-style reference:

“Business performance metrics focus on outcomes such as earnings, cashflow, and marketshare. Agile metrics like epics delivered measure team output, not business value.”

—Project to Product, Mik Kersten

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6:Distinguishes business impact from process metrics.

Shift Left Testingmeans moving testing earlier in the development process, so defects are found sooner and fixes are cheaper.

Unit testing as part of CIis the classic “shift left” strategy: automated unit tests run with every code change, catching errors before code moves further down the pipeline.

Testing in production(A) is “shift right.”

Manual testing(B) is typically late-stage and not automated.

Biannual vulnerability assessments(D) are after-the-fact and far from “shift left.”

Extract-style reference:

“Shift left means performing testing activities earlier, for example by including unit tests in the CI process, reducing costly late-stage defects.”

—DevOps Handbook

PeopleCert Foundation: “Shift left” is a key DevOps testing principle—find issues fast, fix fast, deploy safely.

The two best measures to showshared successacross technology teams arethroughputandstability:

Throughput(deployment frequency, lead time): Measures how fast teams deliver value.

Stability(change failure rate, MTTR): Measures how reliably systems operate.

Why these two?

Focusing onbothensures teams deliver quicklyandsafely. High throughput without stability causes outages; stability without throughput slows business.

Other options:

Deployment frequency + change lead/cycle time: Both are throughput measures, missing stability.

MTTR + change failure rate: Both are stability, missing throughput.

Employee retention and NPS: People measures, not delivery.

Extract-style reference:

“High performers in DevOps exhibit both high throughput (deployments per day) and high stability (low failure rates, fast recovery), proving it’s possible to achieve both.”

—Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, Ch. 2

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6:Shared success is about flowandreliability, not just one or the other.

Agile funding is flexible and adapts to the iterative, incremental nature of Agile and DevOps projects.

It can be fixed cost for some work, continuous cost for ongoing value streams, and is reviewed frequently to align with evolving priorities.

All three characteristics are true, so D (“All of the Above”) is correct.

Extract-style reference:

“Agile funding models support continuous review and adaptation, providing the flexibility required for digital transformation and DevOps ways of working.”

— Project to Product, Mik Kersten

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: Advocates funding models that encourage agility, experimentation, and rapid value delivery.

Learning through immersionis powerful in DevOps because:

People learn by doing (A)

People learn from subject matter experts (B)

People learn from failures in a safe environment (C)

All of the above (D) are true

DevOps encourages hands-on, real-world, collaborative, and safe-to-fail learning environments.

Extract-style reference:

“Immersive learning, including hands-on labs, peer interactions, and blameless retrospectives, is vital to building DevOps capabilities.”

—DevOps Handbook,Accelerate

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6:Calls for learning culture, blamelessness, and experimentation.

The most effective approach to tool selection in DevOps is to establish a toolchain—a set of integrated tools that support the end-to-end lifecycle (planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, and monitoring).

This encourages consistency, automation, and traceability, while still allowing flexibility for teams.

Why not standardize on one vendor?

This reduces flexibility, can cause vendor lock-in, and doesn’t support the varied needs of Dev and Ops teams.

Encouraging independent selection (C) increases fragmentation.

Focusing solely on testing (D) ignores the broader lifecycle.

Extract-style reference:

“Establishing an integrated toolchain provides end-to-end visibility and automation across the software delivery pipeline, aligning tools with process and cultural change.”

— State of DevOps Report; DevOps Handbook

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: Recommends a toolchain approach for supporting collaborative DevOps practices.

Continuous Delivery’s primary benefit is that itreduces the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes. By keeping software deployable at all times, teams can ship small, low-risk releases as needed.

A:Prioritizing features over deployability increases risk.

B:Not all releases are deployed immediately; CD keeps themready.

D:CD doesn’t automate everything—some manual steps may remain, especially in Continuous Delivery (vs. Continuous Deployment).

Extract-style reference:

“Continuous Delivery reduces deployment pain by ensuring that code is always in a deployable state, decreasing the cost, time, and risk associated with releases.”

—Continuous Delivery, Jez Humble & David Farley

PeopleCert Syllabus: Highlights CD as a strategy for safer, more efficient business change.

Let’s clarify what these terms mean in DevOps:

Continuous Integration (CI):Developers integrate code into a shared repository frequently (ideally daily), with each integration automatically verified by tests.

Continuous Delivery (CD):Ensures software is always in a releasable state. Every change can be deployed to production, but the deployment itself may be a manual decision.

Continuous Deployment:Every change that passes automated tests is automatically deployed to production,withoutmanual intervention.

Why is D (“Continuous Deployment requires a manual push button”) NOT TRUE?

BecauseContinuous Deploymentis aboutno manual intervention—once code passes all tests, it’s automatically pushed live. Manual deployment is a feature of Continuous Delivery, not Continuous Deployment.

Extract-style reference:

“Continuous Deployment means that every change goes through the pipeline and is automatically put into production, resulting in many production deployments every day.”

—Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, Jez Humble & Nicole Forsgren

DevOps Foundation v3.6distinguishes between Continuous Delivery (manual trigger) and Continuous Deployment (fully automated).

One of the core DevOps values is aligning IT efforts with business objectives—understanding the business “why.” The Foundation syllabus highlights the need for IT to understand the organization's purpose, cause, and belief. Without this, IT can’t effectively support value delivery or drive digital transformation. Understanding the organizational “why” connects daily activities to strategic objectives, a key DevOps mindset.

Wait Timeis the time work spends waiting between process steps—wasted, non-value-added time.

Mathematically,Wait Time = Lead Time – Cycle Time

Lead Time:Time from work request to delivery.

Cycle Time:Time spent actively working on the item.

Why is this important in DevOps?

Identifying and reducing wait time (waste) is central to Lean/DevOps, directly improving flow and reducing delays.

Extract-style reference:

“Wait time is calculated as the difference between lead time and cycle time—highlighting bottlenecks in the value stream.”

—DevOps Handbook

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6:Wait time is a core Lean concept for optimizing flow.

Automationbrings multiple key benefits in DevOps:

Higher quality:Automated tests and deployments catch errors earlier, reduce human error, and ensure consistency.

Faster recovery:Automated monitoring and remediation help restore services quickly after incidents.

Other options either decrease quality, increase errors, or make releases less predictable—contradicting DevOps goals.

Extract-style reference:

“Automation reduces errors, increases quality, accelerates lead time, and shortens recovery by ensuring repeatable, reliable processes.”

—DevOps Handbook

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6:Automation is a pillar of DevOps, referenced throughout the syllabus as a key driver for speed and reliability.

Ablame cultureis toxic and inhibits innovation. DevOps encourages a culture where risk-taking and experimentation are rewarded, not punished.

Organizations should "build rituals that reward risk taking"—examples include celebrating “fast failures” and running blameless post-mortems.

Extract-style reference:

“Encourage a culture where failure is seen as a learning opportunity, not a cause for punishment. Rituals that reward risk-taking foster innovation and create psychological safety.”

—DevOps Handbook

DevOps Foundation v3.6 (Cultural Principles section) advocates psychological safety, learning from failure, and reward systems that incentivize experimentation.