A few weeks ago I sat the AZ-400 exam. It had been an objective of mine to do after AZ-104 the year before, but as always life gets in the way. When ever I cleared some time so work on this, something came up and it got pushed. At the start of the year I decided to book the exam and give myself a concrete deadline to get it done. And then two weeks before the exam, I remembered it was coming up fast and I’d done nothing yet…
Prep
Turns out that having spend the past few years using Azure DevOps (ADO from this point forward) day to day, have meant that I know a fair amount about it already. Heading over to the MS Learn site I looked though the list of modules on offer and picked out the things I seldom (if ever) use. Azure Boards and Test Plans being the main things here.
Luckily a big chunk (40%-45%) was on build and release pipelines. So, that was great…having spent hours wrestling with yaml pipelines to get them to work, building self hosted agents, creating releases etc. A few hours on MS Learn modules and I had to try out an example test to see where my weaknesses were.
For practice tests, I again used Whizlabs as well as some MS tests available through work. What did that first run though tell me…Well, there was a little crossover from AZ-104. I needed to know more about configuring Azure Boards and a refresher on the SCRUM/Agile terminology as well has how to integrate into Slack/Teams. I also needed to know how to configure GitHub actions and connect ADO with GitHub. And, for some reason, roles and permissions needed to do mobile dev?!?
After a little more reading around I was pretty much ready for the exam.
Exam
Similar to AZ-104, the exam contains a mix of question types: case study, fill in the blank type questions, correctly select and order a number of statements to do something and the usual multiple choice. As before, once you get to the case study you can’t go back to the other section (and you can’t go back at all once you answer the question). Fully prepared for it this time and it all went well this time. I wonder what the renewal will be like given I’ve not seem much change in ADO over the past two years.