SAFe DevOps Practitioner SDP 6.0 Exam Questions

Topic 1: DevOps

---

What best describes the DevOps?

⬜ A high-performing DevOps Team
⬜ Combine Deployment and Releases
⬜ Strong organizational structure
⬜ A culture, a mindset and a set of technical practices

Which statement is true about DevOps?

⬜ It enables low-risk releases and fast recovery with fast fix-forward
⬜ It enables low-risk releases and fast recovery with no room for errors
⬜ It enables high-risk releases and fast recovery with fast fix-forward
⬜ It enables a tolerance for low-risk, low-failure, and rapid recovery

*What are two benefits of DevOps? (Choose two)

⬜ Less frequent deployments
⬜ More lead time
⬜ Less time spent on new work
⬜ Fewer defects
⬜ Less time spent fixing security issues

*Which statement describes a measurable benefit of adopting DevOps practices and principles?

⬜ It results in faster lead time, and more frequent deployments
⬜ It identifies key Value Streams
⬜ It guarantees an increase in profits and decrease in downtime
⬜ It creates a highly functional, cross-team culture

Which statement is true when continuously deploying using a DevOps model?

⬜ It alleviates the reliance on the skill sets of Agile teams
⬜ It increases the transaction cost
⬜ It lessens the severity and frequency of release failures
⬜ It ensures that changes deployed to production are always immediately available to end-users

What organizational anti-pattern does DevOps help to address?

⬜ Teams that are isolated and working within functional areas (e.g., business, operations, and technology)
⬜ Too much focus on centralized planning
⬜ Walls of confusion between Customers and the business
⬜ Organizations that make decisions along functional lines

*Gemba walks are an important competency in support of which activity of the DevOps Health Radar?

⬜ Hypothesize
⬜ Continuous Exploration
⬜ Collaborate and Research
⬜ Learn

*Which teams should coordinate when responding to production issues?

⬜ Teams across the Value Stream
⬜ Dev teams and Ops teams
⬜ Support teams and Dev teams
⬜ SRE teams and System teams

*What is the main goal of a SAFe DevOps transformation?

⬜ To create a strong DevOps team with leadership support
⬜ To create immutable infrastructure to avoid changes to the production environment
⬜ To implement an advanced tool chain to automate the entire Continuous Delivery Pipeline
⬜ To align people across the Value Stream to deliver value continuously

*DevOps is a key enabler of continuous delivery. What does continuous mean in this context?

⬜ To deploy to production and release on cadence every Iteration
⬜ To deploy to production and release at least once every Program Increment
⬜ To deploy to production as often as possible and release when the business needs it
⬜ To deploy to production multiple times per year and release on a cadence once or twice a year

Which statement describes what could happen when development and operations do not collaborate early in the pipeline?

⬜ Surprises are found in deployment that lead to significant rework and delay
⬜ Automation of integration test is not possible
⬜ Teams build things quickly but build the wrong things
⬜ Lead times are reduced

The DevOps Health Radar aligns the four aspects of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline to which four stakeholder concerns?

⬜ Exploration, integration, development, reflection
⬜ Portfolio, Solution, program, team
⬜ Productivity, efficiency, speed-to-market, competitive advantage
⬜ Alignment, quality, time-to-market, business value

What does SAFe’s CALMR approach apply to?

⬜ PI Planning
⬜ DevOps
⬜ Economic Framework
⬜ Continuous Deployment

How does “C” in CALMR approach to DevOps help to organize around value and deliver continuous value?

⬜ By automating the continuous delivery pipeline
⬜ By Measuring the flow, quality & value
⬜ By creating a culture of shared responsibility
⬜ By accelerating delivery using lean flow

*What is a core DevOps principle?

⬜ Lean Budgets
⬜ Culture
⬜ Servant leadership
⬜ Iteration review

What is one element of the CALMR approach to DevOps?

⬜ Maximize work in process
⬜ Relentlessly reduce risk
⬜ Lean Flow accelerates delivery
⬜ Activate the knowledge worker

*What should be measured in a CALMR approach to DevOps?

⬜ Deployment frequency
⬜ Mean time to restore
⬜ Everything
⬜ Flow, quality, and value

*Who is responsible for ensuring quality is built into the code in SAFe?

⬜ Agile Teams
⬜ Product Owners
⬜ Testers
⬜ Developers

Who is responsible for building and continually improving the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ System Teams
⬜ Agile Release Trains
⬜ Scrum Teams
⬜ DevOps Teams

One goal of DevOps in SAFe is to fully automate the steps between which two pipeline activities?

⬜ Code commit and release
⬜ Code commit and user acceptance testing
⬜ Code commit and deploy
⬜ Code commit and stage

What can impede the progress of a DevOps transformation the most?

⬜ When teams use frequent retrospectives
⬜ When there is no DevOps team
⬜ When various groups in the organization have different directions and goals
⬜ Lack of funding for CI/CD pipeline tools

What marks the beginning of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ An idea
⬜ A committed Feature
⬜ A checked-in change
⬜ A committed user story

Topic 2: Value Stream Mapping

---

*What is the primary benefit of value stream mapping?

⬜ It fosters collaboration among development and operations managers
⬜ It creates the hypothesis of which Solution to build
⬜ It identifies how to build Agile Release Trains
⬜ It provides insight into organizational efficiency and value flow

What is the purpose of Value Stream Mapping?

⬜ To create an action plan for continuous improvement
⬜ To create an understanding of the budget
⬜ To understand the priorities of the Product Owner (PO)
⬜ To deliver incremental value in the form of working tested software and systems

Which two statements describe the purpose of value stream mapping? (Choose two.)

⬜ To create an action plan for continuous improvement
⬜ To visualize how value flows
⬜ To deliver incremental value in the form of working, tested software and systems
⬜ To create an understanding of the budget
⬜ To understand the Product Owner’s priorities

What does value stream mapping help reveal in the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ Bottlenecks to the flow of value
⬜ Where automation is needed
⬜ Who is responsible for optimizing the Value Stream
⬜ DevOps practices that will improve the value stream

Mapping the value stream helps accomplish which two actions? (Choose two.)

⬜ To serve as a blueprint for development
⬜ To prioritize the Program Backlog
⬜ To gain insight into organizational efficiency
⬜ To understand how the flow of value can be improved
⬜ To add or remove user segments based on business decisions

What is one of the top advantages of mapping the current state of the Value Stream?

⬜ To help identify and make short-term fixes
⬜ To help with incremental software delivery
⬜ To achieve a collective understanding and consensus around problems
⬜ To identify some of the processes within the delivery pipeline

*After the team maps the steps of the current state Value Stream during value stream mapping, what are the next two steps? (Choose two.)

⬜ Identify who is involved in each step
⬜ Create a future state value stream map
⬜ Perform a SWOT analysis
⬜ Calculate the Activity Ratio
⬜ Measure the performance at each step

What are the first two actions for visualizing the current state of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline? (Choose two.)

⬜ Identify the steps
⬜ Identify the people
⬜ Identify throughput
⬜ Identify lead time
⬜ Identify the development methodology

What are the first two areas that should be identified in value stream mapping? (Choose two.)

⬜ The steps
⬜ The people who do the work
⬜ Process time, lead time, and percent complete and accurate
⬜ The bottlenecks
⬜ The people who supervise the work

What should the team be able to do after current-state mapping?

⬜ Define a plan to reduce the lead time and increase Active Time
⬜ Identify those responsible for the biggest bottlenecks in the process
⬜ Describe the biggest bottlenecks in the delivery pipeline
⬜ Define Enabler Features that will improve the Value Stream

*Value stream mapping metrics include calculations of which three metrics? (Choose three)

⬜ Total Process Time
⬜ Rolled % Complete and Accurate
⬜ Activity Ratio
⬜ Release Frequency
⬜ Outage Frequency
⬜ Emergency Change %

*What does the %C&A metric measure in the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ The percent concurrent and accurate process times of each pipeline activity
⬜ The percent complete and average times of each pipeline activity
⬜ The percent of change averages of each pipeline activity
⬜ The percent of time downstream customers receive work that is usable as-is

Who should be consulted first when calculating the % Complete and Accurate?

⬜ The people responsible for the next step
⬜ The lead developer
⬜ End users
⬜ Testers

What does the activity ratio measure in the Value Stream?

⬜ The percentage of time spent on non-value-added activities
⬜ The percentage of time spent on manual activities
⬜ The percentage of time spent on delays to the number of processes in the Value Stream
⬜ The percentage of time spent on value-added activities

Which statement illustrates the biggest bottleneck?

⬜ WT = 5 days, AT = 2.5 days, %C&A = 100%
⬜ WT = 1 day, AT = 0.5 day, %C&A = 90%
⬜ WT = 10 days, AT = 0.5 day, %C&A = 100%
⬜ WT = 6 days, AT = 5 days, %C&A = 100%

Which steps in the Value Stream should be the main focus when prioritizing improvement items?

⬜ Steps with a long process time
⬜ Steps with long lead time and short process time in the current-state map
⬜ Steps with a high activity ratio
⬜ Steps with short process time and short lead time in the future-state map

What is the lead time for a particular step in a value stream?

⬜ Time from when the work is ready from the previous step to work completion
⬜ Waiting time at a particular step
⬜ Process time at a particular step
⬜ Time taken to complete a task at a particular step

What is true about the Boundaries and Limitations portion of the DevOps Transformation Canvas?

⬜ It captures budget constraints that will prevent DevOps improvements
⬜ It captures improvement items that require the support of other people or teams
⬜ It captures the lowest priority improvement items
⬜ It captures the people who need to be involved in the DevOps transformation

Which Flow Accelerator focuses on improving the effective throughput of value through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ Visualize and Limit Work in Process (WIP)
⬜ Identify and Eliminate Bottlenecks
⬜ Organize Around Value
⬜ Automate the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Topic 3: Continuous Exploration

---

What are two aspects of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, in addition to Continuous Integration? (Choose two)

⬜ Continuous Deployment
⬜ Continuous Exploration
⬜ Continuous Release
⬜ Continuous Improvement
⬜ Continuous Testing

The Continuous Exploration aspect primarily supports which key stakeholder objective?

⬜ Quality
⬜ Time-to-market
⬜ Alignment
⬜ Business value

Which of the following aspects of the continuous delivery pipeline focuses on understanding customer needs?

⬜ Release on Demand
⬜ Continuous Integration
⬜ Continuous Deployment
⬜ Continuous Exploration

What does Continuous Exploration help understand?

⬜ Release strategy
⬜ Solution performance
⬜ Customer needs
⬜ Supplier proposals

What is the primary purpose of defining a solution hypothesis in Continuous Exploration?

⬜ To create a detailed project plan for development
⬜ To validate assumptions about customer needs and solution viability
⬜ To finalize the product design before development begins
⬜ To assign tasks to development teams

What is the benefit of validating a solution hypothesis early in the development process?

⬜ It ensures that all features are implemented as initially planned
⬜ It allows for adjustments before significant resources are invested
⬜ It guarantees immediate market success
⬜ It eliminates the need for further testing

*What are two activities performed as part of defining the hypothesis in Continuous Exploration? (Choose two)

⬜ Identify metrics based on leading indicators
⬜ Define the minimum viable product
⬜ Elicit feedback
⬜ Use value stream mapping
⬜ Develop a detailed business case

*Which statement describes the Lean startup lifecycle?

⬜ Define the minimum viable product (MVP), build the MVP, implement Epic Features until all Features are delivered
⬜ Define the hypothesis, build a minimum viable product (MVP), continuously evaluate the MVP while implementing additional Features until WSJF determines work can stop
⬜ Define a Lean business case, build a minimum viable product, implement the Epic Features until all Features are delivered
⬜ Create a hypothesis statement, assign an Epic owner, deliver Features created from the Lean business case, deploy

*Identifying the Minimal Marketable Feature is part of what?

⬜ Lean Principles
⬜ Lean Leadership
⬜ Lean Startup
⬜ Lean UX

How is Lean UX used in Continuous Exploration?

⬜ To automate the user interface scripts
⬜ To create a platform to continuously explore
⬜ To validate the return on investment
⬜ To identify minimum marketable features

*What is the purpose of a minimum viable product?

⬜ To demo to Product Management for feedback
⬜ To release to production
⬜ To validate the hypothesis
⬜ To sell to new markets

What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in the context of SAFe’s Continuous Exploration?

⬜ A fully developed product ready for market release
⬜ The smallest set of features that allows testing of a hypothesis
⬜ A prototype used solely for internal demonstrations
⬜ A version of the product with all planned features implemented

*Innovation accounting stresses the importance of avoiding what?

⬜ ROI calculations
⬜ Quantitative metrics
⬜ Vanity metrics
⬜ Objective metrics

*Weighted Shortest Job First is applied to backlogs to identify what?

⬜ Relative economic value
⬜ Epics, Features, and Capabilities
⬜ User business value
⬜ Proxy for job size

*When preparing a DevOps backlog, prioritizing features using WSJF includes which two factors? (Choose two)

⬜ Cost of delay
⬜ Duration/job size
⬜ Business value
⬜ Total count of items on the Program Backlog
⬜ Team velocity

What is the recommended way to prioritize improvement items for the DevOps transformation?

⬜ Minimum marketable feature
⬜ Weighted Shortest Job First
⬜ Lean business case
⬜ Minimum Viable Product

Where do features go after Continuous Exploration?

⬜ Into the Portfolio Backlog, where they are then prioritized
⬜ Into Continuous Integration, where they are then split into Stories
⬜ Into Continuous Integration, where they are deployed with feature toggles
⬜ Into Continuous Development, where they are implemented in small batches

Topic 4: Continuous Integration

---

What is one aspect of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ Continuous Security
⬜ Continuous Integration
⬜ Continuous Experimentation
⬜ Continuous Delivery

Continuous Integration enables which key business objective?

⬜ Quality
⬜ Time-to-market
⬜ Alignment
⬜ Business value

When does the Continuous Integration aspect of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline begin?

⬜ When a Feature has been pulled for work
⬜ When code is checked in to version control
⬜ When the Team Backlog has been refined
⬜ When a User Story has satisfied its definition of done

*Scanning application code for security vulnerabilities is an important step in which aspect of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ Continuous Exploration
⬜ Continuous Deployment
⬜ Release on Demand
⬜ Continuous Integration

Value flows through which aspect in the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ Research
⬜ Monitor
⬜ Continuous Integration
⬜ Develop

What is the correct order of activities in the Continuous Integration aspect?

⬜ Stage, Develop, Build, Test end-to-end
⬜ Build, Develop, Stage, Test end-to-end
⬜ Develop, Test end-to-end, Build, Stage
⬜ Develop, Build, Test end-to-end, Stage

What is a pattern for splitting Features into Stories?

⬜ Layers of the technology stack
⬜ Variations in data
⬜ Team Skills
⬜ Task to complete

Which two quality practices apply to Agile teams? (Choose two.)

⬜ Providing architectural runway
⬜ Peer review and pairing
⬜ Decentralized decision-making
⬜ Using nonfunctional requirements
⬜ Establishing flow

Which two technical practices focus on Built-in Quality? (Choose two.)

⬜ Environment configuration
⬜ Pair work
⬜ Test-driven development
⬜ Feature toggles
⬜ Canary releases

How should developers integrate refactoring into their workflow?

⬜ Allocate a portion of their capacity to refactoring in every Iteration
⬜ Create and estimate refactoring tasks for each Story in the Team Backlog
⬜ Create and estimate refactoring Stories in the Team Backlog
⬜ Refactor continuously as part of test-driven development

*Which two security skills are part of the Continuous Integration aspect? (Choose two)

⬜ Application security
⬜ Penetration testing
⬜ Security board review
⬜ SOX compliance analysis
⬜ Network security practices

Which technical practice incorporates build-time identification of security vulnerabilities in the code?

⬜ Threat modeling
⬜ Application Security
⬜ Penetration testing
⬜ Dynamic code analysis

*What work is performed in the Build activity of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ Code review
⬜ Compile
⬜ Code
⬜ Automated acceptance testing

*What is trunk-based development?

⬜ Each developer maintains a separate branch
⬜ Teams with similar dependencies create one single branch for the team’s work
⬜ All teams committing their code into one trunk
⬜ Every team works in their own trunk

What is a consequence of working in isolation on long-lived code branches?

⬜ End-to-end tests will fail
⬜ Trunk/main will not always be in a deployable state
⬜ Deployments will fail
⬜ Rollbacks will be difficult

Which technical practice is key to enabling trunk-based development?

⬜ Refactoring
⬜ Code freezes
⬜ Feature branching
⬜ Gated commits​

What is the primary purpose of creating an automated test suite?

⬜ To enable continuous testing
⬜ To eliminate all manual testing
⬜ To increase unit test coverage during an Iteration
⬜ To increase the return on investment for finding defects

What is one reason for test data management?

⬜ To automate provisioning data to an application in order to set it to a known state before testing begins
⬜ To track the results of automated test cases for use by corporate audit
⬜ To provide a viable option for disaster-recovery management
⬜ To truncate data from the database to enable fast-forward recovery

How do gated commits support the principle of ‘Build Quality In’ in SAFe DevOps?

⬜ By allowing code to be integrated without any testing
⬜ By ensuring that code changes are tested and validated before integration, preventing defects from entering the main branch
⬜ By focusing solely on manual code reviews
⬜ By delaying testing until after code has been deployed​

What is the primary purpose of a staging environment in the Continuous Deployment pipeline?

⬜ To allow customers to access the latest features before release
⬜ To validate the system in a production-like environment before releasing to end users
⬜ To test only the user interface and front-end functionality
⬜ To conduct focus group studies for future features

What is the purpose of the blue/green deployment pattern?

⬜ To decouple deployment from release
⬜ To ensure no changes happen in production without going through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
⬜ To deploy to only some data centers to reduce the deployment risk
⬜ To deploy between an inactive and active environment

Topic 5: Continuous Deployment

---

What is the primary purpose of a dark launch in the Continuous Deployment pipeline?

⬜ To release new functionality to all end users immediately
⬜ To deploy new functionality to production without releasing it to end users
⬜ To test new features in a development environment
⬜ To roll back deployed features that caused issues

Continuous Deployment enables which key business objective?

⬜ Manage technical debt
⬜ Release continuously
⬜ Time-to-market
⬜ Business value

Feature toggles are useful for which activity?

⬜ To accelerate the deployment process
⬜ To decouple deployment from release
⬜ To enable continuous code integration
⬜ To enable continuous testing

*When full deployment automation is not possible, which practice helps developers deploy code into production?

⬜ Deployment automation
⬜ Continuous Deployment
⬜ Infrastructure as code
⬜ Self-service deployment

Which skill can significantly accelerate mean-time-to-restore by enabling support teams to see issues the way actual end users did?

⬜ Blue/green deployment
⬜ Incident management
⬜ Page analytics
⬜ Session replay

Which practice appears under the Respond activity?

⬜ Site Reliability
⬜ Rollback
⬜ Service virtualization
⬜ Telemetry

Which two skills appear under the Respond activity? (Choose two.)

⬜ Cross-team collaboration
⬜ Version control
⬜ Telemetry
⬜ Automatic rollback
⬜ Service virtualization

*What is the desired frequency of deployment in SAFe?

⬜ Continuous
⬜ Daily
⬜ Once per Iteration
⬜ Once per PI

Which practice prevents configuration drift between production and non-production environments?

⬜ Deployment automation
⬜ Session replay
⬜ Immutable infrastructure
⬜ Self-service deployment

What is one potential outcome of the Verify activity of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ Analyze regression testing results
⬜ Analyze end user behavior and Feature adoption metrics
⬜ Fix a broken build
⬜ Roll back a failed deployment

Topic 6: Release on Demand

---

*What differentiates Deployment and Release in the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

⬜ Deployment occurs multiple times per day; release occurs on demand
⬜ Deployment occurs multiple times per day; release occurs in PI boundaries
⬜ Deployment involves moving changes to staging; release involves moving them to production
⬜ Deployment involves moving changes to production; release involves making them available to end users

*The Release on Demand aspect enables which key business objective?

⬜ Business value
⬜ Quality
⬜ Time-to-market
⬜ Alignment

What is the primary goal of the Stabilize activity?

⬜ To enhance stability with blue/green deployment
⬜ To achieve active-active site replication
⬜ To avoid unplanned outages and security breaches
⬜ To establish quality-of-service agreements with customers

*What falls outside the scope of the Stabilize activity?

⬜ Features are monitored after release
⬜ Continuous security monitoring is done
⬜ Blue/green deployment
⬜ Failover and recovery processes are in place

Ensuring that security controls such as threat modeling, application security, and penetration testing are in place throughout the Continuous Delivery Pipeline is an example of which stabilizing skill?

⬜ Failover / disaster recovery
⬜ Security operations
⬜ Design for operations
⬜ Continuous security monitoring

What is one recommended way to architect for operations?

⬜ Create detailed run books
⬜ Establish an architecture review board
⬜ Require developers to support their own code
⬜ Implement feature toggles

*What are two important items to monitor in production to support the Release on Demand aspect in SAFe? (Choose two)

⬜ System performance
⬜ Business value
⬜ Number of concurrent users
⬜ Unit test coverage
⬜ Percent Complete and Accurate (%C&A)

*How frequently should Agile Release Trains release?

⬜ One per PI
⬜ On demand
⬜ Continuously
⬜ Once per iteration

What is an output of the Release activity?

⬜ A Feature migrated to the cloud
⬜ A Feature deployed to production
⬜ A Feature made available to end users
⬜ A Feature made available to internal users

Why are canary releases used?

⬜ To prevent outages
⬜ To introduce minimum viable features
⬜ To reduce deployment times
⬜ To allow incremental release

A canary release involves making a solution available to whom?

⬜ Internal users followed by external users
⬜ Internal users only
⬜ Any subset of users
⬜ External users only

*Why is it important to take a structured approach to analyze problems in the delivery pipeline?

⬜ It provides a structured roadmap for the SAFe implementation
⬜ It helps ensure that actual causes of problems are addressed, rather than symptoms
⬜ It ensures that solutions are more likely to be approved for implementation
⬜ It allows the solution to be demoed to key stakeholders

Which two areas should be monitored in the Release on Demand aspect to support DevOps and Continuous Delivery? (Choose two.)

⬜ Full-stack system behavior
⬜ Build status
⬜ Agile Release Train velocity
⬜ Deployment cycle time
⬜ Business Metrics

Why is hypothesis evaluation important when analyzing data from monitoring systems in the Release on Demand aspect?

⬜ It helps quickly create balanced scorecards for stakeholder review
⬜ It helps link objective production data to the hypothesis being tested
⬜ It helps operations teams know where to apply emergency fixes
⬜ It helps define the minimum viable product (MVP)