CI/CD Assessment: Sample Questions | Bryq
Beginner
Intermediate
Advanced
These are three sample questions from Bryq’s CI/CD assessment, a technical test for hiring DevOps engineers, release engineers and software engineers who build and maintain delivery pipelines. The full assessment covers three levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced, from core automation workflows to deployment strategies, release management, pipeline security and optimization. Each question is multiple choice, with one correct answer out of four options.
Beginner
Question
A developer’s push breaks the build on the main branch. What is the best practice?
Select your answer
Fix or revert the change promptly so the main branch stays in a working state.
Keep merging other changes, and fix the build at the end of the sprint.
Disable the failing test so the pipeline passes again.
Wait for the nightly build to confirm the failure.
WHY IS THIS THE CORRECT ANSWER
Continuous integration only works if the main branch stays buildable, so a broken build is treated as the team’s top priority. Fixing or reverting quickly keeps feedback reliable for everyone. Disabling the test hides the problem, and stacking more changes on top makes the cause harder to find.
Intermediate
Question
Why should the same build artifact be promoted through test, staging and production, rather than rebuilt for each environment?
Select your answer
It guarantees that the exact code that was tested is what reaches production.
It reduces the storage space used by the artifact repository.
It allows the testing stage to be skipped in later environments.
It is required for version control to tag releases.
WHY IS THIS THE CORRECT ANSWER
Rebuilding for each environment can pull in different dependency versions or build settings, so production might end up running code that was never tested. Promoting one unchanged artifact, with environment-specific settings supplied as configuration, ensures that what passed testing is exactly what gets deployed.
Advanced
Question
Which practice best protects a pipeline from a compromised third-party dependency being pulled into a build?
Select your answer
Pin versions with lockfiles and verified checksums, and scan dependencies in the pipeline.
Always pull the latest version of each dependency at build time.
Run builds with administrator privileges to avoid permission errors.
Let developers install dependencies manually on the build agents.
WHY IS THIS THE CORRECT ANSWER
Pinning versions and verifying checksums means a build only uses the exact packages that were reviewed, so a tampered or newly malicious release can’t slip in unnoticed. Scanning flags known vulnerabilities before deployment. Pulling the latest version on every build, or running with extra privileges, widens the attack surface instead.
