Questions for the DEVOPS FOUNDATION were updated on : Dec 01 ,2025
An organization currently manages projects using traditional waterfall methods. ITIL processes are
equally rigorous. A new CIO has been hired to increase IT performance and introduce DevOps
practices.
Initially, which of the following would be critical success factors for DevOps?
D
Explanation:
Both B and C (Application of agile and lean methods + Management commitment to culture change)
are critical success factors when launching DevOps in a traditional IT organization.
Agile/Lean methods: Accelerate delivery, reduce waste, create feedback.
Management commitment to culture change: Essential for breaking silos, changing behaviors, and
making DevOps sustainable.
Forming a pilot team (A) helps, but isn’t sufficient without these foundations.
Extract-style reference:
“DevOps success starts with leadership commitment to cultural change and adopting Agile and Lean
principles throughout the organization.”
— DevOps Handbook, State of DevOps Report
PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: Lists cultural commitment and Lean/Agile as prerequisites for
DevOps transformation.
Which of the following is NOT a crucial ingredient when leading a digital transformation?
B
Explanation:
Command (authoritarianism) is not a crucial ingredient for leading digital transformation.
The key ingredients:
Collaboration
Curiosity
Courage
DevOps leadership is about empowering teams, experimenting, and driving change, not command-
and-control.
Extract-style reference:
“Digital transformation leaders embrace collaboration, curiosity, and courage, fostering an
environment where experimentation and learning drive change.”
— Accelerate, DevOps Handbook
PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: Advocates servant and transformational leadership, not
command/control.
What makes the concept of learning through immersion particularly useful in a DevOps culture?
D
Explanation:
Learning through immersion is 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.
Which of the following is NOT a dimension of transformational leadership?
D
Explanation:
Coercive communication (using force or threat) is not a 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
Which of the following sets of skills are essential for a DevOps professional?
A
Explanation:
A DevOps professional needs:
Business skills: Understanding the business context and value.
Technical skills: Automation, coding, cloud, infrastructure.
Core (soft) skills: Collaboration, communication, empathy, learning.
Self-management: Time, priorities, feedback.
Other options miss the full blend or focus too much on tech or process.
Extract-style reference:
“DevOps success requires a blend of business, technical, and core (soft) skills, as well as the ability to
self-manage and continuously learn.”
— DevOps Handbook; Accelerate
PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: Holistic skillsets are emphasized for cross-functional teams.
What is NOT an example of a business performance metric?
C
Explanation:
Epics delivered is a software/process metric, not a business performance metric.
Business performance metrics include 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.
What is NOT a type of IT work?
D
Explanation:
Manufacturing is not a 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.
How do you define Wait Time?
A
Explanation:
Wait Time is 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.
Which of the following is NOT a metric for culture?
B
Explanation:
Deployment frequency is not a culture metric.
It’s a process metric, indicating how often code is released.
Culture metrics focus on engagement, morale, retention, psychological safety, and NPS.
Why not the others?
Employee NPS: Measures employee satisfaction and willingness to recommend.
Engagement/morale: Direct indicators of cultural health.
Retention: How well an org keeps talented people, reflecting culture.
Extract-style reference:
“Measuring DevOps culture relies on employee engagement, morale, and retention, not on delivery
metrics like deployment frequency.”
— State of DevOps Report
PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: Culture metrics focus on people, not just process.
Which two measures together BEST show shared success across technology teams?
A
Explanation:
The two best measures to show shared success across technology teams are throughput and stability:
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 on both ensures teams deliver quickly and safely. 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 flow and reliability, not just one or the
other.
In the context of DevOps. which is an effective approach when selecting tools?
A
Explanation:
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.
An organization is using ChatOps to improve communication and collaboration.
How can this organization transfer incident-related data from its chat client to its IT service
management tool?
C
Explanation:
ChatOps is the integration of chat platforms with tools and workflows, allowing teams to manage
operations and incidents directly through chat.
Using an API (Application Programming Interface) is the correct, scalable way to transfer incident-
related data automatically from chat clients to ITSM (IT Service Management) tools, preserving
traceability and reducing manual errors.
Why not manual cut/paste?
Manual processes are error-prone and slow; DevOps aims for automation and integration.
Extract-style reference:
“APIs enable seamless transfer of information between ChatOps platforms and ITSM tools,
supporting automation, accuracy, and auditability in incident management.”
— DevOps Handbook; ChatOps: Managing Operations and Collaboration in the Cloud, Jason Hand
PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: Promotes APIs for integration, automation, and collaboration.
Which of the following are benefits of automation?
D
Explanation:
Automation brings 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.
A large organization conducts a DevOps toolchain review and discovers that multiple development
teams have built their own continuous delivery pipelines with a variety of different tooling.
Which of the following strategies would NOT help them manage their toolchain evolution moving
forwards?
B
Explanation:
Forcing all development teams to immediately migrate to a standard set of tools dictated by IT
Operations is not a recommended DevOps strategy.
DevOps promotes collaboration, flexibility, and evolution of 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), and self-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.
Updates to a complex critical business service are released every calendar quarter. The business
would like to increase the frequency of releases for this service.
Why would segmenting the service into microservices help to improve the frequency of release?
A
Explanation:
Microservices architecture breaks 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.