AZ-400 Configure processes and communications Practice Question
Your team is migrating from on-premises TFS to Azure DevOps Services. You need to ensure that all existing work item history and attachments are preserved. Which migration approach should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates assume the REST API is sufficient for full migration, but it lacks built-in support for preserving history and attachments, requiring custom development that is more error-prone than using the purpose-built open-source tools.
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 the Azure DevOps Migration Tools (open source)
The Azure DevOps Migration Tools (an open-source project) are specifically designed to migrate work items, including history, attachments, and links, from on-premises TFS to Azure DevOps Services. These tools handle the complex data transformations required to preserve the full fidelity of work item data, which is not possible with simpler export/import methods.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Export to Excel and import using Azure DevOps Office Integration
Why it's wrong here
Excel-based Office Integration only performs a field-level bulk import of flat work item data; it cannot carry over revision history, attachments, or link relationships. The resulting items are new instances with no provenance to the original TFS items, so this approach fails the historical fidelity requirements of a proper migration.
- ✗
Manually recreate work items in Azure DevOps
Why it's wrong here
Recreating work items by hand in Azure DevOps produces a clean but completely severed data set, discarding every revision, comment, state change, custom field value, attachment, and work-item link from the original TFS environment. It also assigns new IDs and timestamps, destroying traceability and audit history, and is neither repeatable nor scalable for any sizable portfolio.
- ✓
Use the Azure DevOps Migration Tools (open source)
Why this is correct
The Azure DevOps Migration Tools are open-source utilities built specifically for TFS-to-Azure DevOps migrations, using the Client Object Model to incrementally copy work items while preserving full revision history, attachments, links, and custom field/process template mappings. They support repeated, configurable v2 migrations with migration state tracking, making them the only listed option that can meet historical fidelity and traceability requirements.
- ✗
Use the Azure DevOps REST API to migrate work items
Why it's wrong here
Using the Azure DevOps REST API to migrate work items is technically possible but requires writing and maintaining extensive custom migration scripts. The API exposes work item creation and update endpoints, but it does not natively copy full revision history, attachments, or all link types; each artifact must be individually fetched and recreated, forcing you to re-implement state-machine logic and handle ID remapping yourself. Moreover, the API does not preserve the original revision timeline as a single atomic operation, so audit trails and historical transitions are flattened or lost unless you manually reconstruct them, which is error-prone and not a supported migration path.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to DevOps and Azure DevOps
Key term
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps is a Microsoft service that provides development tools for planning, building, testing, and deploying software applications using automated pipelines and collaboration features.
Key term
DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the development lifecycle and deliver high-quality software continuously.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every AZ-400 question from scratch — 823 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-400 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-400 exam.