ITGSS Certified DevOps Engineer Practice Test

What does Continuous Delivery encompass beyond automating the build and unit testing?

1. Pre-deployment security checks

2. Provisioning and configuring test environments

3. User acceptance testing

4. Identifying system performance issues

The correct answer is: Provisioning and configuring test environments

Continuous Delivery is a software development practice that aims to ensure that code can be deployed to production at any time. While automating the build and unit testing is a crucial part of this process, Continuous Delivery extends beyond that to include various other practices and processes that prepare code for a stable release. When considering provisioning and configuring test environments, this aspect is essential in Continuous Delivery. It ensures that the software can be tested in a consistent and controlled manner that mirrors the production environment. This preparation is crucial because any discrepancies between the development and production settings can lead to failures post-deployment. By automating the provisioning and configuration of test environments, teams can accelerate their deployment pipelines while maintaining high-quality standards. On the other hand, pre-deployment security checks, user acceptance testing, and identifying system performance issues, while beneficial in the overall software development lifecycle, do not encapsulate the core essence of Continuous Delivery as directly as provisioning and configuring test environments. These activities are often part of a broader quality assurance strategy but do not specifically focus on the readiness of the environment for deployment, which is central to the Continuous Delivery approach.