AZ-400 Azure DevOps Exam Experience

I passed the AZ-400 Azure DevOps exam last week, so thought I would share a few thoughts for anyone else considering it.

I mostly used the AZ-400 course on Linux Academy by Tim Lawless to study for it and found it an excellent resource. I thought Tim did a great job of not just covering the topics as per the published curriculum, but also went further into illustrating many of the third-party integrations with Azure DevOps. To be fair it made a lot of sense to do this, since at a minimum at least an awareness of these integrations for common software build and deploy tools such as Jenkins, SonarQube, WhiteSource, Maven, Gradle etc is covered in many places in the exam.

In addition around 30 - 40% of the exam is based on Agile / DevOps theory, practice and general experience with building software in different programming languages, i.e. not technical questions around products available within the Azure DevOps suite. If that is not part of your day job or something you are unfamiliar with, then I would suggest the following books, for the Agile / DevOps part anyway:

- The Phoenix Project - https://itrevolution.com/book/the-phoenix-project/ - Google Site Reliability Engineering - https://landing.google.com/sre/books/

Since all Pearson VUE test centres are currently closed and my original on-site exam booking for April was cancelled, I switched over and took it via the online exam format. I was pleasantly surprised by the experience and would definitely consider it again over a test centre. After going through some initial security checks, ID and pictures of room you are taking the test in, it was nice to not be in a room with others testing at the same time and the inevitable distractions of noise and movement. I was then monitored by a proctor via my laptop’s webcam. My online real concerns were preventing one of my currently at home family members walking into the room and invalidating the exam or perhaps troubles with home broadband. Thankfully with some preparation and good fortune I experienced no issues. Full details about taking Microsoft exams online can be found here.

The predicted lab portion for this exam was not present, so only case studies and standard multiple choice questions. I haven’t seen anything official, but a few comments on blogs suggest this has been removed temporarily from all MS exams for performance reasons due to the greater demand for online rather than on-site exams at the moment.

I hope this helps you if you are headed down this certification path.