DevOps-Foundation PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 Exam Questions and Answers

TheDeming Cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act)is foundational to continuous improvement in Lean, and is specifically applied in theImprovement Katapractice:

Improvement Kata: A structured routine for continuous, incremental improvement based on scientific thinking (PDCA).

Value Stream Mapping and Andon cord are Lean practices, but they don’t directly reference PDCA as the core mechanism.

Extract-style reference:

“The Improvement Kata incorporates the Deming cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act) to drive small, rapid cycles of change, helping teams to experiment, learn, and adjust.”

—Toyota Kata, Mike Rother

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: Cites PDCA as integral to continuous improvement and Lean/DevOps adoption.

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.

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.

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.

Businesses are drawn to DevOps because it improves agility, responsiveness, and quality.

A: The growth of IoT requires scalable, automated, and reliable delivery processes.

B: Fast, intelligent decision-making is needed to respond to market changes.

D: The shift toward valuing customer outcomes over products is central to modern service delivery.

However,Cis a misconception. While automation is a key DevOps practice, the goal isstrategic automation—automating where it adds measurable value, improves quality, or accelerates delivery. “Automate all the things” without consideration can waste resources, increase complexity, and reduce adaptability.

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 emphasizes thatthere is no single “ideal” team structurefor DevOps. The optimal structure depends on organizational size, maturity, product complexity, and culture.

While cross-functional teams (as described inAandC) are common in mature DevOps environments, and temporary tiger teams (B) may be used for rapid initiatives, the key is flexibility. Some organizations integrate DevOps practices into existing teams, while others create dedicated platform teams, guilds, or enablement teams.

The focus should be onremoving silos, fostering collaboration, and aligning around value streams—not adhering to a rigid structure.

In DevOps, success depends on collaboration betweenall key stakeholdersacross the software delivery value stream. This includes:

Software Engineers & Operations Teams: Responsible for designing, building, deploying, and maintaining applications and services.

Business Representatives: Define requirements, prioritize work, and ensure alignment with organizational goals.

Security and QA Testers: Ensure that quality, compliance, and security are built into the delivery pipeline from the start (shift-left approach).

PeopleCert emphasizes the idea of “BizDevOps” and “DevSecOps,” highlighting the need for business, development, operations, and security to work as an integrated team. The removal of silos and the inclusion of all perspectives ensure that value is delivered faster and more reliably, while maintaining quality and compliance.

Choosing only one group would miss the cross-functional nature of DevOps. Hence, the correct answer isD – All of the Above.

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.

According to PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6, the five primary values that guide successful DevOps adoption are summarized in theCALMSframework:Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing.

Culturefocuses on breaking down silos, encouraging trust, and promoting collaboration between development, operations, security, QA, and business teams.

Automationis essential for speeding up delivery, reducing manual errors, and ensuring repeatability across the software delivery lifecycle.

Leanemphasizes the elimination of waste, limiting work in progress (WIP), and improving flow.

Measurementmeans using metrics and data to inform decisions, identify bottlenecks, and drive continuous improvement.

Sharingfosters transparency, knowledge transfer, and a unified approach to goals and problem-solving.

Option A replaces automation and lean principles with softer collaboration aspects, which are important but not recognized as the formal value set. Option C replaces “Measurement” with “Metrics,” which is only a part of measurement. Option D substitutes “Accountability” for “Automation,” which is not part of the CALMS model.

Therefore, the official correct set of values per the DevOps Foundation syllabus isB.

Reducing delays in launching projects requires eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks in the delivery process:

A: Continuous Integration (CI) with automated builds speeds up integration and reduces defects.

B: Test-Driven Development (TDD) ensures quality from the start, reducing rework and post-development bug fixing.

C: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables rapid, repeatable provisioning of environments, avoiding manual setup delays.

All three practices contribute to faster, more reliable project starts. As PeopleCert notes, combining these practices creates a strong automation foundation, enabling organizations to move from idea to delivery quickly.

Therefore,D—All of the above—is correct.

TheThomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI)is a psychometric tool that measures an individual’s behavior in conflict situations—specifically, how they handle disagreement with colleagues.

It classifies responses into five modes: Competing, Collaborating, Compromising, Avoiding, and Accommodating.

Why not the others?

Kubler Ross Change Curve:Describes emotional responses to change, not conflict styles.

Westrum’s Typology:Categorizes organizational culture (pathological, bureaucratic, generative) but doesn’t measure individual behavior.

Value Stream Mapping:A process improvement tool, not a behavioral assessment.

Reference/Extract:

“The Thomas-Kilmann instrument helps teams understand how individuals approach conflict and collaboration, enabling better resolution strategies—a key aspect of high-performing DevOps teams.”

—DevOps Handbook; PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 Section 3.7

When teams have experienced frequent top-down mandates without adequate involvement, they may feel change fatigue and resist new initiatives. PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 emphasizes the importance ofengagement and empowermentto build buy-in and ownership for DevOps transformation.

Empowering people means involving them in decisions, encouraging contribution of their ideas, and making them active participants in shaping the DevOps adoption plan. This approach builds trust, reduces resistance, and taps into collective knowledge, leading to solutions that are practical and widely accepted.

OptionsA,B, andCcan support DevOps adoption but do not address the root cause of low enthusiasm—lack of involvement. Empowerment fosters intrinsic motivation, which is essential for sustained cultural change.

Thus,Dis the most effective choice.

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.

Creating Single Points of Failure (SPOFs)is not a feature of Safety Culture—in fact, it’s the opposite.

Safety Culture in DevOps promotesblameless post-mortems,valuing incidents as learning opportunities, andthanking contributors for uncovering weaknesses.

SPOFs increase risk and discourage experimentation.

Extract-style reference:

“Safety Culture is built on blamelessness, psychological safety, and learning from failure, not punishment. SPOFs are an anti-pattern that increases fragility.”

—The DevOps Handbook

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: Stresses the importance of a safe, collaborative environment for innovation.

When Kanban teams feel overwhelmed and nothing is getting finished, it’s a sign thattoo much work is in progress(WIP).

Work in Progress (WIP) limitsare a key Kanban and Lean practice: they restrict how many tasks can be active at one time, forcing teams to focus, finish, and deliver before starting new work.

Pushing more work(A) oradding more resources(B) worsens the problem.

Unblocking work(D) is helpful, but the core issue isoverload.

Extract-style reference:

“WIP limits encourage teams to finish work before starting new tasks, reducing context switching and enabling better flow and faster delivery.”

—Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, David J. Anderson

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation: Limiting WIP is essential for effective flow and sustainable pace.

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.

TheThird Wayin DevOps emphasizescontinual learning and experimentation. One of the most effective resilience-building practices in this category ischaos engineeringor deliberate fault injection. This involves introducing controlled failures into systems—such as shutting down services, simulating network latency, or exhausting resources—totest the organization’s recovery capabilityin realistic scenarios.

By practicing recovery under controlled conditions, teams identify weaknesses in monitoring, automation, documentation, and communication before a real incident occurs. This improvesMean Time to Recovery (MTTR)and overall system resilience.

OptionA(constraint analysis) relates to theFirst Way(flow optimization). OptionCfocuses on feedback loops (Second Way). OptionD(adding redundancy) is a possible improvement but does not inherently practice and improve operational recovery skills in the same way as deliberate fault injection.

Therefore,Bis the most appropriate Third Way principle for improving resilience in this scenario.

DevOps is not a standalone framework—it draws from several methodologies and frameworks to achieve its goals. PeopleCert emphasizes the integration of:

Agilefor iterative delivery, customer collaboration, and responsiveness

ITSMfor effective service delivery and operational stability

Leanfor waste elimination, flow optimization, and continuous improvement

WhileAlists relevant processes, they are subsets rather than foundational frameworks.Cdescribes cultural alignment but is not a set of frameworks.Dincludes valuable concepts but does not match the official trio highlighted in PeopleCert’s materials.

Thus,Bis correct.

Loosely coupled architecturesare not typical IT constraints; in fact, they are often a solution to constraints.

Typical IT constraints include:

Security assessments (slow approvals)

Bureaucratic processes (excessive paperwork or approvals)

Development delays (resource or tool bottlenecks)

Extract-style reference:

“Loosely coupled architectures enable teams to work independently, reducing constraints imposed by tightly integrated systems.”

—Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps

DevOps Foundation v3.6 lists constraints as blockers to fast flow and highlights architectural decoupling as a DevOps enabler.

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.

Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of frequently merging small code changes into a shared repository, followed by automated builds and tests. Theprimary benefitisearly detection and resolution of integration issues. When commits are tested together continuously, defects are caught soon after introduction, reducing the cost and complexity of fixing them.

WhileB(more developers can work together) is a side effect, it is not the primary goal.C(pushing changes quickly) is more related to Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment.D(version control) is a prerequisite for CI, not the main benefit.

Therefore,Acorrectly captures the primary benefit—finding and fixing issues early before they reach production.