EXIN DevOps Professional study plan

EXIN DevOps Professional · Give each week a clear focus.

8 weeks · About 6 hours per week

Week 1

DevOps Practices (Flow, Feedback, Continual Learning) & DevOps Culture and Organizational Change

Explain the Three Ways (flow, feedback, continual learning) and map each to at least two concrete practices you can name from memory.
Distinguish the First Way's focus on left-to-right flow from the Second Way's focus on right-to-left feedback, using an example from a deployment pipeline.
Identify the five types of work in the DevOps sense (business projects, internal IT projects, changes, unplanned work, and value-adding work) and give an example of each.
Describe how DevOps differs from traditional ITIL-style service management in terms of change management and release cadence.

A one-page concept map linking the Three Ways to at least eight named practices, with a one-sentence definition for each.

Week 2

Explain the concept of organizational culture and distinguish it from organizational structure.
Describe the cultural shifts DevOps requires, including trust, blamelessness, and shared responsibility between Dev and Ops.
Compare at least three organizational models (e.g., functional silos, cross-functional teams, platform teams, communities of practice) and state a trade-off for each.
Identify common sources of resistance to DevOps change and propose a response to each.

A 600-word written analysis of one realistic organizational scenario, recommending a target team topology and naming three risks to the change.

Week 3

Explain what a value stream map is and construct a simple one from a described deployment process.
Calculate lead time, process time, and percent complete and accurate from a value stream map you have drawn.
Identify the biggest constraint in that value stream and justify the choice with the numbers.
Explain how limiting work in progress (WIP) and reducing batch size improve flow.

A hand-drawn or text value stream map with lead time, process time, %C/A, and a written justification of the top constraint.

Week 4

Explain the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, and state when each is appropriate.
Describe the role of version control, trunk-based development, and short-lived branches in enabling flow.
Explain infrastructure as code and configuration management, and contrast declarative with imperative approaches.
Describe how a deployment pipeline is structured and what quality gates belong at each stage.

A written design of a deployment pipeline for a sample application, listing each stage, its trigger, and its quality gate.

Week 5

Explain the purpose of automated testing at unit, integration, and acceptance levels and how the test pyramid guides investment.
Describe how to make builds reproducible and why artifact management matters.
Explain the concept of telemetry and how production monitoring supports fast feedback.
Describe how to automate database changes and other risky deployment steps safely.

A test strategy document for one application covering test levels, ownership, run frequency, and the automation tooling you would choose.

Week 6

Distinguish leading from lagging indicators and give three examples of each relevant to software delivery.
Explain the four key metrics of delivery performance (lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change failure rate, time to restore) and what each reveals.
Describe how to design metrics that resist gaming and avoid punishing the people being measured.
Explain how error budgets and service level objectives connect reliability goals to release decisions.

A metrics dashboard specification naming at least six metrics, each with its definition, data source, owner, and intended decision.

Week 7

Explain how blameless postmortems turn incidents into organizational learning.
Describe how to inject failure deliberately and what you would learn from a game day or chaos experiment.
Explain the relationship between resilience engineering, defense in depth, and fast recovery over prevention alone.
Design a feedback loop that routes production insight back into development priorities.

A postmortem template plus a completed example postmortem for a realistic incident, including contributing factors and action items.

Week 8

Synthesize all four domains into a single improvement roadmap for a described organization.
Diagnose which of the Three Ways is weakest in a scenario and justify the diagnosis with evidence.
Defend sequencing choices for automation versus culture change against likely objections.
Practice timed exam-style reasoning by answering scenario questions and explaining why each distractor is wrong.

A 12-month DevOps improvement roadmap with three phases, each with goals, practices, metrics, and a stated dependency on the prior phase.

Week 2: You can explain the Three Ways and the cultural case for DevOps without notes, and you have written your organizational analysis.

Week 4: You can read a described delivery process and produce lead time, process time, and %C/A, and you have a complete pipeline design.

Week 6: You can name and define the four delivery metrics plus at least two leading indicators, and you have a metrics dashboard specification.

Week 8: You can answer mixed scenario questions across all four domains and defend a sequenced roadmap in writing.