Domain 7 — Developer Productivity and Operational Enablement (7%)
7% of the exam, roughly 4 questions. The smallest domain — know the shape, do not over-invest.
7.1 Standardising a team's setup
The question this domain asks is whether a team can build and run the thing you designed, repeatably. The mechanisms, and what each is actually for:
| Mechanism | Purpose | Shared how |
|---|---|---|
CLAUDE.md and .claude/rules/ | Conventions, architecture, standing guidance — context, not enforcement | Committed to the repository |
.claude/settings.json | Permissions, hooks, environment — enforcement | Committed; managed settings for organisation-wide policy that cannot be overridden |
| Skills and commands | Repeatable procedures the whole team invokes the same way | Committed under .claude/ |
.mcp.json | Shared MCP servers, with ${VAR} expansion so no secrets are committed | Committed at the repository root |
| Subagents | Specialised, tool-restricted roles — a read-only reviewer, a test runner | .claude/agents/, committed |
The distinction that carries marks is the same one as at Foundations level, asked organisationally:
CLAUDE.md guides, settings and hooks enforce. A policy that must hold across
an organisation goes in managed settings, which individual project or user files cannot override.
7.2 Operational enablement
- Reproducible automation. In CI,
claude -p --bareskips auto-discovery of hooks, plugins, MCP servers, memory andCLAUDE.md, so a run behaves identically on every machine. Without it, a teammate's personal configuration can change a pipeline's behaviour. - Bounded autonomy in automation. Permission modes, allow-lists, and caps on turns, subagent depth, concurrency and spend.
- A debugging path. Structured output from headless runs, logged
request_ids, and a documented way to reproduce a failure locally. - Onboarding that is a file, not a person. If the setup lives in one engineer's head, the team has a single point of failure disguised as expertise.
7.3 Supporting the team in production
When an operational issue arrives, the enablement question is whether anyone other than the author can diagnose it. That requires the observability from Domain 3 to be in place, the runbook from Domain 6 to exist, and the eval suite from Domain 4 to be runnable on demand so a suspected regression can be confirmed rather than argued about.
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