Development and Operations
What this domain tests
This domain covers how software is built, delivered, and kept running: development methods, testing, version control, deployment, monitoring, and incident handling. Questions test whether a candidate can describe a repeatable delivery process and reason about reliability. Expect topics such as agile ceremonies, requirements traceability, test levels, continuous integration and delivery, configuration management, and operational metrics.
Concepts to master
Know the test levels (unit, integration, system, acceptance) and what each is meant to catch. Understand version control basics: branching, merging, and why every change should be traceable to a requirement or ticket. Review CI/CD: continuous integration merges and builds frequently, continuous delivery keeps releases deployable, continuous deployment releases automatically. Operations concepts include monitoring versus logging, alert thresholds, backup and restore testing, and incident severity levels. Change management and rollback planning are central: a deployment without a rollback path is a risk.
Traps in questions
Common distractors confuse continuous delivery with continuous deployment, or claim testing guarantees the absence of defects rather than reducing risk. Another trap is treating monitoring as a substitute for logging, or assuming a backup is valid without a restore test. Questions on incidents often reward restoring service first and investigating root cause afterward; answers that begin with deep analysis during an outage are usually wrong. Watch for automation presented as removing the need for human approval on high-risk changes.
Worked example
A release fails in production. The correct first move is to roll back to the last known good version and restore service, then run a post-incident review to find the cause and add a test that would have caught it.
Rule of thumb: restore service first, learn second, and automate only what you can verify and reverse.