DevOps Foundation study plan

Define DevOps in your own words and list the business problems it is meant to solve.

Explain each of the Three Ways (flow, feedback, continual learning) using a concrete example from a fictional organisation.

Map the CALMS framework components against the Three Ways and note where they overlap.

Compare DevOps with Agile, Lean and ITIL in a written comparison table with at least four dimensions.

Classify at least six workplace behaviours using Westrum's pathological, bureaucratic and generative culture types.

Explain psychological safety and outline the steps of a blameless postmortem.

Identify five behaviours that build trust and shared ownership between development and operations staff.

Apply Conway's Law to explain how a given organisational structure would shape a system's architecture.

Calculate lead time and cycle time for a sample value stream and state which one the customer experiences.

Identify at least five of the seven Lean wastes in a software delivery scenario and propose one countermeasure for each.

Explain how batch size and WIP limits affect throughput and queue time, using a small worked example.

Compare Scrum, Kanban and SAFe on cadence, roles and work-in-progress control.

Distinguish continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment with an example of each.

Diagram the stages of a deployment pipeline from commit to production and state the quality gate at each stage.

Explain when blue/green, canary and rolling deployment patterns are each the better choice.

Justify trunk-based development and version control as the single source of truth for build, config and infrastructure.

Categorise automation opportunities across build, test, deployment, infrastructure and configuration management.

Explain the benefits and risks of infrastructure as code and describe how it is kept under version control.

Compare containers and virtual machines for deployment consistency and isolation.

Explain how cloud platforms and service-oriented architectures change the deployment and operational model.

Describe shift-left security and give three examples of security controls embedded in the pipeline.

Define the four key delivery metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, time to restore) and compute each from a self-written scenario.

Distinguish leading from lagging indicators and give two DevOps examples of each.

Explain how to instrument a pipeline to capture build duration, test pass rate and failure recovery time.

Contrast vanity metrics with actionable metrics and describe how a metric can be gamed plus one safeguard against it.

Describe feedback loops at the individual, team and system levels and give one mechanism for each.

Outline how to facilitate a retrospective and convert findings into testable improvement experiments.

Apply a plan-do-check-act cycle to one recurring delivery problem and define the success measure.

List four knowledge-sharing mechanisms (documentation, pairing, internal communities, chat-based operations) and state when each works best.

Re-attempt the five questions you missed most often in weeks 1-6 and write out why the correct answer is correct.

Rebuild a one-page summary for each of the six domains from memory, then correct it against your notes.

Complete two full-length timed practice exams covering all domains.

Explain every key term in the six domains aloud without notes for ten minutes.

Review only the topics still marked weak after both mocks and close them out.