AZ-400 Configure processes and communications Practice Question
A company recently migrated its CI/CD pipelines from Jenkins to Azure Pipelines. The development team is experiencing frequent build failures due to conflicting changes when multiple developers push code simultaneously. The team wants to maintain a linear history and avoid merge commits. Which strategy should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates assume Git-based strategies (like rebase or squash merge) can prevent simultaneous push conflicts, but they only manage how history looks after a merge, not the underlying conflict that occurs when two developers push changes to the same file at the same time.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) with exclusive checkout enabled.
Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) with exclusive checkout enforces a lock on a file when a developer checks it out, preventing simultaneous edits. This eliminates conflicting changes that cause build failures when multiple developers push code concurrently, and since TFVC does not use merge commits, it maintains a linear history. The scenario explicitly requires avoiding merge commits and resolving conflicts from simultaneous pushes, which TFVC’s exclusive checkout directly addresses.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Switch to Git with a central repository and require merge commits.
Why it's wrong here
Switching to Git with a central repository does not add file locking or conflict prevention: Git's distributed model allows concurrent edits to the same file, and requiring merge commits only preserves history, it does not prevent the merge conflicts that arise when two developers modify overlapping lines. Without exclusive checkout, Git will still need manual resolution when simultaneous pushes touch the same code.
- ✗
Enforce a rebase strategy for all pull requests in the branch policy.
Why it's wrong here
Enforcing a rebase strategy rewrites commits to create a linear history, but a rebase does not lock files or serialize edits; when two users have the same file checked out and push concurrently, the second rebase still has to resolve the same merge conflict against the updated remote branch. Branch policies govern pull request completion, not preventing overlapping edits in real time.
- ✓
Use Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) with exclusive checkout enabled.
Why this is correct
TFVC with exclusive checkout is correct because it enables server-side, per-file locking: as soon as one developer checks out a file, any other user's attempt to check out that same file is blocked until the first check-in, thereby ensuring no concurrent edits can create conflicts and enforcing a strictly linear history over the shared files.
- ✗
Configure Azure Repos to use squash merge when completing pull requests.
Why it's wrong here
Squash-merge settings only collapse all pull request commits into a single commit on merge; they do nothing to coordinate simultaneous work, so multiple developers can still push conflicting changes to the same files in the source branch and manual conflict resolution will still be required.
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