Pass the PeopleCert DevOps DevOps-Foundation Questions and answers with CertsForce

Automationbrings 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.

Ablame cultureis toxic and inhibits innovation. DevOps encourages a culture where risk-taking and experimentation are rewarded, not punished.

Organizations should "build rituals that reward risk taking"—examples include celebrating “fast failures” and running blameless post-mortems.

Extract-style reference:

“Encourage a culture where failure is seen as a learning opportunity, not a cause for punishment. Rituals that reward risk-taking foster innovation and create psychological safety.”

—DevOps Handbook

DevOps Foundation v3.6 (Cultural Principles section) advocates psychological safety, learning from failure, and reward systems that incentivize experimentation.

Continuous Delivery’s primary benefit is that itreduces the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes. By keeping software deployable at all times, teams can ship small, low-risk releases as needed.

A:Prioritizing features over deployability increases risk.

B:Not all releases are deployed immediately; CD keeps themready.

D:CD doesn’t automate everything—some manual steps may remain, especially in Continuous Delivery (vs. Continuous Deployment).

Extract-style reference:

“Continuous Delivery reduces deployment pain by ensuring that code is always in a deployable state, decreasing the cost, time, and risk associated with releases.”

—Continuous Delivery, Jez Humble & David Farley

PeopleCert Syllabus: Highlights CD as a strategy for safer, more efficient business change.

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,notcommand-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.

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.

High-performing organizationsembed learning into their culture, which leads to continuous improvement, innovation, and adaptability.

Employees and leadership committed to learning (option C) is a proven characteristic of high performance.

Other options—individualism, mandated training, and disincentivized development—are actually barriers to DevOps success.

Extract-style reference:

“High-performing organizations deliberately invest in learning and development and have leaders who model and reward learning behaviors.”

—Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, Nicole Forsgren et al.

PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6: The syllabus highlights that a “culture of learning” and psychological safety are core characteristics of successful DevOps organizations.

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.

Cultural debt—not just low trust or poor leadership—best describes the scenario of entrenched silos and combative Dev/Ops relations.

Cultural debt leads to resistance to new ways of working, lack of cooperation, and a focus on individual rather than collective success.

Why not the others?

Low trustandpoor leadershipare symptoms of cultural debt.

Change fatigueoccurs after repeated failed initiatives; here, the core issue is cultural stasis.

Reference/Extract:

“DevOps transformation often fails without addressing cultural debt. Breaking down silos, building shared understanding, and changing incentives are essential for sustainable change.”

—DevOps Handbook,State of DevOps Report, PeopleCert DevOps Foundation v3.6 Section 3.4

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.

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.