PeopleCert DevOps-Foundation PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 Exam Exam Practice Test

Poor communication and collaboration slow incident resolution. DevOps emphasizes fast, transparent communication channels between Dev, Ops, and other stakeholders. Implementingchat platforms(e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams) that integrate with monitoring, alerting, and deployment tools enables:

Real-time collaboration across geographically distributed teams

Immediate sharing of incident context and system data

Faster decision-making and coordinated action

A(alerting more people) risks causing noise without improving targeted response.B(social media) is not secure or appropriate for enterprise incident management.C(self-help tools) benefits end-users but does not address Dev–Ops collaboration.

Thus,Dprovides the most direct and effective improvement in communication for faster incident resolution.

Coercive communication(using force or threat) isnota transformational leadership dimension.

Transformational leaders:

Inspire vision

Recognize contributions

Stimulate new ideas (intellectual stimulation)

Foster intrinsic motivation

Extract-style reference:

“Transformational leadership builds trust, motivates by vision, provides intellectual stimulation, and recognizes individuals—not by coercion, but by inspiration.”

—Transformational Leadership(James Burns), PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6

ADevOps cultureis built on principles like being data-driven, reflective (willing to learn from experience), and accountable (taking ownership, not blaming others).

Command and controlcultures are the opposite: hierarchical, rigid, discouraging initiative and learning. DevOps strives for empowerment, experimentation, and psychological safety.

Why not the others?

Data-driven:Decisions are based on measurement and feedback, core to DevOps.

Reflective:Regular retrospectives and post-incident reviews are essential DevOps rituals.

Accountability:Teams are responsible for the software they build and operate.

Reference/Extract:

“DevOps culture values collaboration, continuous learning, and a data-driven, accountable approach to improvement. Command and control structures stifle innovation and slow down feedback.”

—State of DevOps Report(2019), PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 Section 3.2

PeopleCert emphasizes thatarchitecturemust be planned before automating processes. This means mapping the value stream, understanding dependencies, identifying bottlenecks, and defining integration points before selecting or configuring tools.

Automating without a clear architecture can lead to fragmented processes, wasted effort, and technical debt. Once the architecture is sound, teams can implement automation in a way that supports scalability, maintainability, and interoperability.

A(building the toolchain) is important but comes after architecture.C(switching to open source) is a tooling decision, not the first automation step.D(self-service) is a benefit of automation, not the starting point.

Thus,B—Architect before automating—is the correct first step.

ChatOpsis the practice of conducting operational work directly through chat platforms (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams) integrated with automation and tooling. In this case:

Teams from multiple locations are collaborating in real-time via Slack.

They are running commands and queries directly from the chat to the delivery and monitoring systems.

This allows shared visibility, immediate context, and rapid action during incident resolution.

WhileA(Swarming) describes a collaborative incident response, it does not specifically imply integration with chat-based tools.C(Incident Management) is the overall process, andD(IT Support) is a function, but neither capture the specific ChatOps approach.

Thus,B – ChatOpsis the most accurate answer here.

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.

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.

Kanban boards are visual management tools used to track work and manage flow. They provide transparency, limit work in progress (WIP), and help teams focus on delivering value quickly.

A: Reducing WIP is a key Kanban principle that improves flow and delivery speed.

C: Visibility fosters collaboration and shared ownership.

D: By identifying bottlenecks and waste, Kanban helps reduce idle time.

B—defining policies and procedures—is not an inherent benefit of Kanban. While teams may display existing policies on a Kanban board, the board itself does not define them. Its role is to visualize work and flow, not to establish governance rules.

Thus,Bis the correct “NOT” benefit.

Forcing all development teams toimmediately migrateto a standard set of tools dictated by IT Operations isnota recommended DevOps strategy.

DevOps promotescollaboration, flexibility, and evolutionof toolchains, allowing teams to choose what fits their needs while moving toward sensible defaults and integration over time.

Abrupt, top-down mandates undermine trust and autonomy, often leading to resistance and lower adoption.

Why are the other options better?

IT Ops or infra squads managing toolchain as a service(A),sensible defaults(C), andself-service(D) are all recognized best practices to support DevOps evolution and developer enablement.

Extract-style reference:

“Mandating a single toolset without considering team needs reduces engagement. Toolchains should be managed as self-service platforms with sensible defaults, supporting but not constraining teams.”

—State of DevOps Report;DevOps Handbook

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6:Encourages enabling choice, not enforcing uniformity without context.

High-performing organizations use Continuous Delivery practices to improveSoftware Delivery and Operational (SDO) performance.

B: Psychological safety encourages open communication, incident reporting, and learning from failures.

C: Trunk-based development reduces integration issues and supports continuous integration/delivery.

D: Cloud technologies provide scalable, on-demand environments that speed up delivery and testing.

On the other hand,A—a heavyweight change process—slows down delivery, increases lead time, and often fails to improve change success rates. Research cited inAccelerateshows that manual, centralized change approvals correlate with lower performance, while automated, peer-reviewed changes produce better reliability and faster delivery.

TheTheory of Constraints (ToC), as referenced in PeopleCert DevOps Foundation, states:

A: Every system has at least one limiting factor (constraint) that determines overall performance.

B: System throughput is limited by the capacity of the constraint; improving non-constraints has minimal impact.

C: Focusing improvement efforts on the constraint is the most effective way to improve the performance of the entire system.

In DevOps, constraints may appear in testing, change approvals, environment provisioning, or deployment. By identifying and alleviating these bottlenecks, organizations improve flow and reduce lead time.

Since all three statements (A, B, C) are accurate representations of ToC, the correct answer isD – All of the Above.

DevOps is not simply a team, methodology, or standard. The PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 materials define DevOps as a “cultural and professional movement” that stresses communication, collaboration, integration, and automation to improve workflow between software developers and IT operations professionals. The cultural transformation is fundamental, emphasizing shared responsibilities, breaking down silos, and fostering continuous improvement.

Microservices architecturebreaks down applications into small, independent, loosely coupled services that can be developed, tested, and deployed independently.

Why does this improve release frequency?Each microservice can be updated, tested, and deployed on its own, reducing the risk and coordination overhead associated with monolithic releases.

This allows for faster feedback and more frequent delivery of value to users.

Extract-style reference:

“Microservices enable teams to deploy independently, reduce deployment risk, and increase release frequency by decoupling services.”

—Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, Chapter 4

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6:Stresses modular architectures for enabling rapid, independent deployments and continuous delivery.

The scenario describes entrenched silos and resistance to change—managers are protective of their domains and don’t see the value of DevOps.

This is a textbook example ofcultural debt: the gap between the organization’s current culture and the adaptive, collaborative culture needed for DevOps success.

Cultural debt, like technical debt, accumulates over time and “must be paid back” for transformation to succeed. It creates friction, slows delivery, and blocks cross-team collaboration.

Why not the others?

Organizational changeis what’s needed, not what they’re suffering from.

Change fatiguearises when people are burned out bytoo muchchange, not resistance.

Low trustis a symptom, but the core problem here is ingrained culture.

Reference/Extract:

“Cultural debt is accrued when organizations fail to evolve their culture to match new ways of working, like DevOps. It manifests in resistance to collaboration, entrenched silos, and leadership unwilling to change.”

—DevOps Handbook, Ch. 2, and PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 Syllabus Section 3.4

Kanbanis a Lean visual management method that helps teams control and improve workflow. The board displays tasks in columns representing process stages, enabling:

Visualization of work items and bottlenecks

Limiting work in progress (WIP) to improve flow and reduce multitasking

Tracking throughput and cycle time for continuous improvement

B(Value Stream Mapping) is a Lean analysis tool, not a visual board for ongoing work.C(Improvement Kata) is a structured improvement method, andD(Continuous Delivery) is a software delivery practice, not a visual workflow tool.

Therefore,A—Kanban—is correct.

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.

In DevOps,culturerefers to the shared values, beliefs, and behaviors that influence how people work together. PeopleCert highlights culture as the foundation for collaboration, trust, and open communication—critical for breaking down silos and enabling continuous delivery.

OptionAbest captures this definition: culture reflects theway people think and behavein their daily work, including attitudes toward experimentation, problem-solving, and collaboration.

While team structure (B), automation strategy (C), and strategic direction (D) are important, they are outcomes or enablers that depend on the underlying culture. Without the right cultural foundation, DevOps practices and tools will not achieve their full potential.

TheThird Wayof DevOps emphasizescontinuous learning and experimentationto drive improvement. Scrum supports this principle throughSprint Retrospectives, which are dedicated sessions at the end of each sprint where the team reflects on what went well, what could be improved, and how to adapt processes or behaviors.

Retrospectives create a structured space for honest discussion, experimentation, and the application of lessons learned. This aligns directly with the Third Way’s focus on learning from successes and failures, promoting innovation, and building a culture of continual improvement.

Bfocuses on throughput, which aligns more with the First Way (flow).Ccould improve collaboration but is not a core mechanism of the Third Way.D(shorter feedback loops) is more related to the Second Way.

Thus,Ais correct because Sprint Retrospectives directly embody the Third Way’s goal of learning and adaptation.

The “Three Ways” are foundational principles in DevOps:

The First Wayfocuses on increasing the flow of work from left (development) to right (operations). It is about optimizing the entire system for fast delivery, limiting bottlenecks, and enabling a rapid flow of features and fixes to customers.

The Second Wayis about amplifying feedback loops so corrections can be made early.

The Third Wayemphasizes continual learning and experimentation.

Extract-style reference:

“The First Way emphasizes the performance of the entire system, as opposed to the performance of a specific silo of work or department. The goal is to maximize the flow of work (value) from Development to Operations to the customer.”

—Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project / DevOps Handbook

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6highlights this in the section on "Principles and Practices," emphasizing The First Way as critical to accelerating flow.

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.

Deployment success ratemeasures the proportion of deployments that meet their objectives without causing incidents, rollbacks, or degraded service. PeopleCert notes this metric is not limited to production—it can be applied to any environment where deployments occur (staging, testing, pre-prod).

Ais incorrect because focusing only on production misses valuable insights from earlier environments.Cis partially correct—success rate can inform reliability—but reliability is more broadly measured with other metrics like availability and MTTR.Dis incorrect becausechange success ratetypically includes all changes, not just deployments.

Therefore,Bis the accurate statement.

Cycle Timein Agile and DevOps measures the time taken for work to move from thestart of active work (“in progress”) to completion (“done”). It reflects the efficiency of the development process and helps identify bottlenecks in active work.

BandCdescribeLead Time, which includes the time spent in the backlog before work starts.Dis a subset metric related to build/test time, not the full cycle time.

Shorter cycle times indicate more efficient processes and faster delivery of value. Monitoring cycle time enables continuous improvement by highlighting delays within active work.

DevSecOps is about integrating security into every stage of the software delivery lifecycle rather than treating it as a separate, post-development activity. PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 stresses that security mustshift left—moving testing, vulnerability scanning, and compliance checks earlier in the process.

Security as Codemeans embedding security policies, controls, and checks directly into infrastructure and application code. This includes:

Automated vulnerability scanning in CI/CD pipelines

Infrastructure-as-code with integrated security configurations

Policy-as-code to enforce compliance automatically

Static and dynamic application security testing (SAST/DAST) integrated into build pipelines

WhileAincorrectly says “shift right” (testing later in production), DevSecOps emphasizes shifting left.B(post-deployment audits) andC(external testing) can complement DevSecOps but don’t fully embed security into the delivery workflow.

Therefore,D – Security as codeis the most direct enabler of DevSecOps practices.

Manufacturingisnota type of IT work in DevOps.

DevOps classifies IT work as:

Business projects:New value-creating work.

Planned work:Routine, repeatable tasks (maintenance, upgrades).

Unplanned work:Incidents, emergencies, support.

Extract-style reference:

“IT work includes business projects, planned work, and unplanned work. Manufacturing is an analogy for flow, but not a category of IT work itself.”

—The Phoenix Project

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6:Recognizes these three categories to manage and improve IT workloads.