CDM DevOps Principles & Culture 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which DevOps concept describes the practice of making small, incremental changes to reduce deployment risk?
- Big bang releases
- Continuous delivery (Correct answer)
- Waterfall integration
- Staged gate reviews
Correct answer: Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery reduces risk by enabling small, frequent, automated deployments to production.
Question 2: The 'Three Ways' of DevOps were popularized by which book?
- The Lean Startup
- The Phoenix Project (Correct answer)
- Accelerate
- Site Reliability Engineering
Correct answer: The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim introduced the Three Ways: Flow, Feedback, and Continual Learning.
Question 3: In DevOps culture, what does 'psychological safety' enable team members to do?
- Skip code reviews without consequences
- Report failures and experiments without fear of blame (Correct answer)
- Deploy without approval gates
- Work in isolated silos
Correct answer: Report failures and experiments without fear of blame
Psychological safety allows team members to surface problems, admit mistakes, and experiment without fear of punishment.
Question 4: Which metric from the DORA research directly measures how quickly a team can recover from a production failure?
- Deployment frequency
- Lead time for changes
- Mean time to restore (MTTR) (Correct answer)
- Change failure rate
Correct answer: Mean time to restore (MTTR)
MTTR (Mean Time to Restore) measures the time from a failure occurring to service being restored.
Question 5: A 'value stream' in DevOps refers to which of the following?
- The revenue generated by a product feature
- The sequence of steps to deliver value from idea to customer (Correct answer)
- The set of automated tests in a pipeline
- The on-call rotation schedule
Correct answer: The sequence of steps to deliver value from idea to customer
A value stream maps all steps — including wait times — from customer request to delivery of working software.
Question 6: What is the primary purpose of a blameless post-mortem in DevOps?
- Identify and discipline the engineer who caused the outage
- Document systemic issues and improve future resilience (Correct answer)
- Satisfy audit compliance requirements
- Generate incident reports for executives
Correct answer: Document systemic issues and improve future resilience
Blameless post-mortems focus on systemic causes and process improvements, not individual fault.
Question 7: Which DevOps practice involves developers and operations staff sharing on-call responsibilities?
- Pair programming
- Shared on-call rotation (Correct answer)
- Kanban boards
- Feature flagging
Correct answer: Shared on-call rotation
Shared on-call rotations build empathy between dev and ops by giving developers direct exposure to production issues.
CDM DevOps Principles & Culture 2
Which DevOps concept describes the practice of making small, incremental changes to reduce deployment risk?