Configure processes and communications (10–15%)
Configure activity traceability and flow of work
Plan and implement a structure for the flow of work and feedback cycles

Identify appropriate metrics related to flow of work, such as cycle times, time to recovery, and lead time

Integrate Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions with work item tracking tools

Implement traceability policies decided by development

Integrate a repository with Azure Boards

Configure collaboration and communication
Communicate actionable information by using custom dashboards in Azure Boards

Document a project by using tools, such as wikis and process diagrams

Configure release documentation, including release notes and API documentation

Automate creation of documentation from Git history

Configure notifications by using webhooks

Design and implement source control (15–20%)
Design and implement a source control strategy
Design and implement an authentication strategy

Design a strategy for managing large files, including Git Large File Storage (LFS) and git-fat

Design a strategy for scaling and optimizing a Git repository, including Scalar and cross-repository sharing

Implement workflow hooks

Plan and implement branching strategies for the source code
Design a branch strategy, including trunk-based, feature branch, and release branch

Design and implement a pull request workflow by using branch policies and branch protections

Implement branch merging restrictions by using branch policies and branch protections

Configure and manage repositories
Integrate GitHub repositories with Azure Pipelines

Configure permissions in the source control repository

Configure tags to organize the source control repository

Recover data by using Git commands

Purge data from source control

Design and implement build and release pipelines (40–45%)
Design and implement pipeline automation
Integrate pipelines with external tools, including dependency scanning, security scanning, and code coverage

Design and implement quality and release gates, including security and governance

Design integration of automated tests into pipelines

Design and implement a comprehensive testing strategy (including local tests, unit tests, integration tests, and load tests)

Design and implement UI testing

Implement orchestration of tools, such as GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines

Design and implement a package management strategy
Design a package management implementation that uses Azure Artifacts, GitHub Packages, NuGet, and npm

Design and implement package feeds, including upstream sources

Design and implement a dependency versioning strategy for code assets and packages, including semantic versioning and date-based

Design and implement a versioning strategy for pipeline artifacts

Design and implement pipelines
Select a deployment automation solution, including GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines

Design and implement an agent infrastructure, including cost, tool selection, licenses, connectivity, and maintainability

Develop and implement pipeline trigger rules

Develop pipelines, including classic and YAML

Design and implement a strategy for job execution order, including parallelism and multi-stage

Develop complex pipeline scenarios, such as containerized agents and hybrid

Configure and manage self-hosted agents, including virtual machine (VM) templates and containerization

Create reusable pipeline elements, including YAML templates, task groups, variables, and variable groups

Design and implement checks and approvals by using YAML environments

Design and implement deployments
Design a deployment strategy, including blue/green, canary, ring, progressive exposure, feature flags, and A/B testing

Design a pipeline to ensure reliable order of dependency deployments

Plan for minimizing downtime during deployments by using virtual IP address (VIP) swap, load balancer, and rolling deployments

Design a hotfix path plan for responding to high-priority code fixes

Implement load balancing for deployment, including Azure Traffic Manager and the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service

Implement feature flags by using Azure App Configuration Feature Manager

Implement application deployment by using containers, binary, and scripts

Design and implement infrastructure as code (IaC)
Recommend a configuration management technology for application infrastructure

Implement a configuration management strategy for application infrastructure, including IaC

Define an IaC strategy, including source control and automation of testing and deployment

Design and implement desired state configuration for environments, including Azure Automation State Configuration, Azure Resource Manager, Bicep, and Azure Automanage Machine Configuration

Design and implement Azure Deployment Environments for on-demand self-deployment

Maintain pipelines
Monitor pipeline health, including failure rate, duration, and flaky tests

Optimize pipelines for cost, time, performance, and reliability

Analyze pipeline load to determine agent configuration and capacity

Design and implement a retention strategy for pipeline artifacts and dependencies

Develop a security and compliance plan (10–15%)
Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation
Implement and manage service connections

Implement and manage personal access tokens

Implement and manage secrets, keys, and certificates by using Azure Key Vault, GitHub secrets, and Azure Pipelines secrets

Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive files during deployment

Design pipelines to prevent leakage of sensitive information

Automate security and compliance scanning
Automate analysis of source code by using GitHub Advanced Security, including code scanning, secret scanning, and dependency scanning for both GitHub and Azure DevOps.

Automate the use of pipeline-based scans, and SonarQube

Automate security scanning, including container scanning and OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)

Automate analysis of licensing, vulnerabilities, and versioning of open-source components by using Mend Bolt and GitHub Dependency Scanning

Integrate GitHub Advanced Security with Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Implement an instrumentation strategy (10–15%)
Configure monitoring for a DevOps environment
Configure and integrate monitoring by using Azure Monitor

Configure and integrate with monitoring tools, such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and the Prometheus managed service

Manage access control to the monitoring platform

Configure alerts for pipeline events

Analyze metrics
Inspect distributed tracing by using Application Insights

Inspect application performance indicators

Inspect infrastructure performance indicators, including CPU, memory, disk, and network

Identify and monitor metrics for business value

Analyze usage metrics by using Application Insights

Interrogate logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries