ECDE study plan

Define DevOps in your own words and contrast it with waterfall and ITIL-driven operations using one concrete release example

Diagram the CALMS framework (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing) and label one real practice you have seen or can adopt for each letter

Explain the Three Ways (flow, feedback, continual experimentation) and map each to a pipeline behavior such as small batch size, fast test feedback, and blameless postmortems

List five DevOps anti-patterns, including a separate DevOps team and a tool-first transformation, and state the organizational symptom each creates

Describe how value stream mapping exposes wait time versus work time in a release process

Define DevSecOps and explain how shifting security left changes when and by whom security checks run

Compare SAST, DAST, SCA, secret scanning, and IaC scanning by what they inspect, when they run, and their typical false-positive profile

Explain threat modeling with STRIDE at the design stage and produce a small threat table for a login feature

Describe how a vulnerability is triaged, scored with CVSS, and given a remediation SLA by severity

Outline the shared-responsibility and compliance context that drives security gates, including audit evidence and policy as code

Write user stories with acceptance criteria and split two epics into stories small enough to complete inside one iteration

Rank a backlog using WSJF or MoSCoW and justify the top three items with explicit scoring

Define a definition of ready that includes security acceptance criteria and testability

Draft a lightweight threat model during planning for one new feature and record the resulting security stories

Configure a board or tracker with workflow states and WIP limits that enforce flow

Set up a Git repository with a trunk-based branching model, short-lived feature branches, and protected main

Write commit messages and pull request descriptions that link to work items and state risk and rollback impact

Configure pre-commit hooks for formatting, linting, and secret detection and verify they block a bad commit

Apply peer review checklists that cover security, testability, and operability, and review one sample change against it

Explain how code review latency and branch lifetime affect delivery flow

Describe a CI pipeline as ordered stages from checkout through unit, integration, and security tests to artifact publication

Write or adapt a pipeline definition that fails fast and caches dependencies

Differentiate unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end tests by scope, speed, and failure signal

Interpret a quality gate based on coverage, duplication, and severity thresholds, and decide when a build should break

Explain artifact versioning and immutability and why the same built artifact must be promoted rather than rebuilt

Compare blue-green, canary, and rolling deployment strategies by blast radius, rollback speed, and infrastructure cost

Define release versus deploy and explain how feature flags decouple them

Design a rollback plan with explicit triggers, owners, and verification steps

Describe how infrastructure as code and environment parity reduce release risk

Apply a progressive delivery gate that halts rollout on an error-rate or latency threshold

Identify the golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) and map each to a concrete metric for one service

Write alert rules that are symptom-based and actionable, and eliminate at least one noisy cause-based alert

Explain SLI, SLO, and error budget and calculate an error budget for a 99.9 percent availability target

Describe centralized logging, correlation IDs, and distributed tracing and how they shorten mean time to recovery

Outline a blameless postmortem template with timeline, contributing factors, and tracked action items

Trace one change end to end across all seven domains and name the security and quality control at each stage

Re-run two timed practice sets and log every missed question by domain

Re-teach the three weakest domains from memory without notes and correct gaps immediately

Consolidate the eight deliverables into a single indexed portfolio for rapid review