DAC DevOps & Continuous Delivery 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In Disciplined Agile, what is the primary goal of a deployment pipeline?
- To automate manual testing phases
- To provide a repeatable, reliable process for delivering software to production (Correct answer)
- To replace the need for a dedicated QA team
- To enforce waterfall-style release gates
Correct answer: To provide a repeatable, reliable process for delivering software to production
A deployment pipeline automates and standardizes the path from code commit to production, ensuring reliability and repeatability.
Question 2: Which DevOps metric measures the average time from code commit to running in production?
- Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
- Change Failure Rate
- Lead Time for Changes (Correct answer)
- Deployment Frequency
Correct answer: Lead Time for Changes
Lead Time for Changes tracks the elapsed time from when a developer commits code until that change is deployed to production.
Question 3: What does 'shift-left testing' mean in a Continuous Delivery context?
- Moving testers to the left side of the team room
- Performing testing activities earlier in the development lifecycle (Correct answer)
- Prioritizing left-to-right test execution order
- Shifting testing responsibility to operations teams
Correct answer: Performing testing activities earlier in the development lifecycle
Shift-left testing moves quality activities earlier in the pipeline so defects are caught closer to their introduction.
Question 4: In a DA context, what is a 'feature toggle' primarily used for in Continuous Delivery?
- Enabling A/B testing only in production
- Decoupling deployment from release so features can be deployed but not yet activated (Correct answer)
- Toggling between microservices versions
- Controlling which teams can access the CI server
Correct answer: Decoupling deployment from release so features can be deployed but not yet activated
Feature toggles allow code to be deployed to production while keeping new features hidden until deliberately activated.
Question 5: Which practice best supports 'continuous integration' in a DevOps environment?
- Merging code to the main branch once per sprint
- Developers integrating their work frequently, at least daily, with automated builds and tests (Correct answer)
- Running full regression suites only before major releases
- Using separate long-lived feature branches until features are complete
Correct answer: Developers integrating their work frequently, at least daily, with automated builds and tests
Continuous Integration requires frequent merges to mainline with automated validation to detect integration problems early.
Question 6: What distinguishes Continuous Delivery from Continuous Deployment?
- Continuous Delivery requires manual approval before production release; Continuous Deployment is fully automated to production (Correct answer)
- Continuous Deployment requires manual approval; Continuous Delivery is fully automated
- Continuous Delivery only covers testing; Continuous Deployment covers infrastructure
- They are identical terms used interchangeably in the DA toolkit
Correct answer: Continuous Delivery requires manual approval before production release; Continuous Deployment is fully automated to production
Continuous Delivery means every build is release-ready but a human gate exists; Continuous Deployment automates the final production push.
Question 7: A DA team wants to reduce their 'change failure rate.' Which practice would most directly help?
- Increasing deployment frequency to small batches (Correct answer)
- Extending the sprint length to allow more testing time
- Reducing the number of automated tests to speed up pipelines
- Moving all testing to a dedicated QA phase after development
Correct answer: Increasing deployment frequency to small batches
Smaller, more frequent deployments reduce batch size and risk, directly lowering the rate of failed changes.
DAC DevOps & Continuous Delivery 2
In Disciplined Agile, what is the primary goal of a deployment pipeline?