CDM DevOps Principles & Culture 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which principle encourages teams to automate repetitive manual tasks to free humans for higher-value work?
- Shift-left testing
- Elimination of toil (Correct answer)
- Change advisory boards
- Manual approval gates
Correct answer: Elimination of toil
Eliminating toil — coined by Google SRE — focuses on automating repetitive operational work that has no lasting value.
Question 2: In the context of DevOps culture transformation, what does 'breaking down silos' primarily mean?
- Removing data storage systems
- Encouraging cross-functional collaboration between Dev, Ops, and other teams (Correct answer)
- Eliminating team specialization entirely
- Merging all departments into one
Correct answer: Encouraging cross-functional collaboration between Dev, Ops, and other teams
Breaking down silos means fostering collaboration and shared ownership across development, operations, security, and business teams.
Question 3: Which DevOps concept refers to the idea that if something is painful, you should do it more often to improve and automate it?
- Chaos engineering
- If it hurts, do it more frequently (Correct answer)
- Fail fast philosophy
- Shift-right testing
Correct answer: If it hurts, do it more frequently
Doing painful things more often (like deployments or testing) forces automation and process improvement.
Question 4: What does 'infrastructure as code' (IaC) primarily enable in a DevOps context?
- Writing application logic using infrastructure APIs
- Managing infrastructure through version-controlled configuration files (Correct answer)
- Replacing cloud providers with on-prem hardware
- Eliminating the need for network engineers
Correct answer: Managing infrastructure through version-controlled configuration files
IaC treats infrastructure configuration as code, enabling versioning, repeatability, and automation of environment provisioning.
Question 5: The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) report categorizes software delivery performance teams into how many performance tiers?
- Two
- Three
- Four (Correct answer)
- Five
Correct answer: Four
DORA categorizes teams into four performance tiers: Elite, High, Medium, and Low performers.
Question 6: Which cultural shift does DevOps encourage regarding failure?
- Treat all failures as unacceptable and preventable
- Use failure as a learning opportunity and invest in resilience (Correct answer)
- Assign failure responsibility to operations teams only
- Avoid discussing failures to maintain team morale
Correct answer: Use failure as a learning opportunity and invest in resilience
DevOps embraces failure as inevitable and uses it to build more resilient systems and processes.
Question 7: In DevOps, 'shifting left' on testing means which of the following?
- Moving testing responsibilities to left-handed team members
- Performing testing earlier in the development cycle (Correct answer)
- Reducing the number of test cases
- Outsourcing testing to a separate QA department
Correct answer: Performing testing earlier in the development cycle
Shifting left integrates testing earlier in the SDLC, catching bugs when they are cheaper to fix.
CDM DevOps Principles & Culture 3
Which principle encourages teams to automate repetitive manual tasks to free humans for higher-value work?