EXIN DevOps Master study plan

Define DevOps in your own words and contrast it with traditional ITIL-driven operations, listing at least five concrete differences

Map the three dimensions of the DevOps model (people, process, technology) and give two examples of friction in each

Explain the business case for DevOps by linking lead time, deployment frequency, and change failure rate to customer outcomes

Identify the main resistance points in a DevOps adoption (culture, silos, fear of change) and draft a one-paragraph counterargument for each

Describe the stages of a DevOps adoption roadmap and order them into a phased plan for a fictional organization

Explain the role of a DevOps coach and distinguish it from a release manager and a scrum master

Design a metric set based on DORA-style measures plus at least two organizational health indicators

Evaluate at least three change-management approaches (top-down, bottom-up, pilot team) and argue which fits which context

Break an epic into user stories that meet the INVEST criteria and add acceptance criteria to each

Explain how requirements differ in a continuous-delivery context compared with a stage-gate process

Write a definition of done and a definition of ready for a sample team

Describe how to keep a product backlog refined when deployment happens daily

Compare monolithic, service-oriented, and microservice architectures on deployability, coupling, and operational cost

Explain the role of a loosely coupled architecture and an API contract in enabling independent deployment

Describe how to design for testability and observability, naming concrete patterns

Identify which design decisions are reversible versus one-way doors and explain why that distinction matters for deployment frequency

Explain trunk-based development and contrast it with long-lived feature branches, including merge-conflict and integration risk

Describe how to keep a build fast and reliable, naming practices such as build caching, parallel test stages, and fail-fast ordering

Design a deployment pipeline with at least four stages and define the quality gate at each

Explain the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment and when each is appropriate

Explain infrastructure as code and configuration management, and contrast declarative with imperative approaches

Describe blue-green, canary, and rolling deployment strategies and state the rollback path for each

Explain how version control and artifact repositories support traceability from commit to production

Outline a test strategy covering unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end tests with a pyramid rationale

Explain how to instrument a service with logs, metrics, and traces and what question each signal answers

Define service level indicators, objectives, and error budgets, and describe how an error budget changes release behavior

Describe how to run a blameless postmortem and what a good action item looks like

Explain how to scale a system horizontally and vertically, and name the bottleneck each approach hits first

Synthesize all four domains into a single end-to-end narrative from idea to production and back to feedback

Rehearse explaining adoption resistance and how to overcome it, using examples from earlier weeks

Audit your own weak areas against the domain weighting and list the three topics needing most review

Complete a timed practice set under exam conditions and review every wrong answer