AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement a source control strategy
Your organization is adopting a trunk-based development strategy with short-lived feature branches. Which branch policy should you enforce to ensure that code is integrated frequently and conflicts are minimized?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse trunk-based development with GitFlow and choose option C (release branches), or they mistakenly think fast-forward-only merges (option D) are required for trunk-based strategies, when in fact squash merges are the recommended approach to maintain a clean, linear history.
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
✓
Require a minimum number of reviewers and enforce a squash merge strategy
In a trunk-based development strategy with short-lived feature branches, the goal is to integrate code frequently and minimize merge conflicts. Requiring a minimum number of reviewers ensures code quality and team awareness, while enforcing a squash merge strategy collapses all feature branch commits into a single commit on the main branch, keeping the history linear and clean. This approach reduces the risk of complex merge conflicts and supports continuous integration by encouraging small, frequent merges.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Allow direct pushes to main branch for senior developers
Why it's wrong here
Even senior developers can introduce regressions; bypassing branch protection removes the safety net of mandatory pull request reviews and CI validation, leading to unreviewed changes entering the shared trunk. This violates trunk-based development quality gates and increases integration risk.
- ✓
Require a minimum number of reviewers and enforce a squash merge strategy
Why this is correct
Requiring a minimum number of reviewers ensures every change is verified before merging to main, while squash merging compresses the feature branch's commit history into a single linear commit on the trunk. This maintains a coherent, reversible history and avoids merge noise, making main always deployable.
- ✗
Create release branches for each production deployment
Why it's wrong here
Trunk-based development emphasizes keeping main always deployable and using feature flags for release packaging; creating long-lived release branches duplicates fixes, often leads to merge conflicts and divergence, and is contrary to the single-source-of-truth model. This practice is more suited to GitFlow than trunk-based development.
- ✗
Require all merges to be fast-forward only
Why it's wrong here
Enforcing fast-forward-only merges forces every integration to be strictly linear but prohibits merge commits and requires constant rebasing, which can disrupt in-flight work and create unnecessary overhead. Trunk-based development relies on short-lived branches and squash merges, not rigid linear histories, so this restriction is too brittle.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Source Control Strategy Design
Key term
Feature
A feature is a distinct unit of functionality that delivers value to the user, often managed and tracked throughout the software development lifecycle.
Key term
Branch policy
A branch policy is a set of rules and conditions enforced on a Git branch to control how code changes are proposed, reviewed, and merged, ensuring code quality and protecting critical branches.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
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