AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement a source control strategy
Your team uses a monorepo in Azure Repos with multiple feature branches. You notice that merge conflicts frequently occur because developers are working on the same files. You want to reduce conflicts and improve collaboration. Which branching strategy should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates choose GitFlow (Option D) because it is a well-known structured model, but they fail to recognize that its long-lived feature branches directly cause the merge conflicts described in the scenario.
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 trunk-based development with feature flags to merge small, frequent changes.
Trunk-based development with feature flags is the correct approach because it encourages developers to merge small, frequent changes into the main branch, reducing the surface area for conflicts. Feature flags allow incomplete features to be hidden in production, enabling continuous integration without requiring long-lived feature branches. This strategy directly addresses the problem of frequent merge conflicts by minimizing divergence between branches.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use release branches for each deployment and cherry-pick commits from main.
Why it's wrong here
Release branches cherry-picked from main create divergent commit histories, because each release branch receives only selected commits while main continues to evolve, so the same fix is applied in different contexts and often needs re-application or conflict resolution when the release branch is eventually merged back. Duplicate patches and context-switching overhead arise since developers must remember which commits have been cherry-picked to each branch and track whether the version present on main matches the release. Moreover, even though release branches might seem short-lived, they remain long-lived in practice for each deployment horizon, and their simultaneous modification of shared files leads to merge conflicts that still require manual reconciliation with main, violating the continuous integration principle that everyone integrates frequently.
- ✓
Use trunk-based development with feature flags to merge small, frequent changes.
Why this is correct
Trunk-based development with feature flags enables developers to merge small, frequent changes directly into the trunk behind a flag, keeping branches short-lived and integration burden low, which minimizes merge conflicts and supports continuous integration and delivery.
- ✗
Use a single main branch and require all changes to be committed directly.
Why it's wrong here
Requiring all changes to be committed directly to main eliminates review and isolation, making it easy for unvalidated work to break the build and forcing developers to resolve merge conflicts in a shared working directory with no branching safety net.
- ✗
Use GitFlow with separate develop and release branches.
Why it's wrong here
GitFlow's permanent develop and release branches are long-lived, cause substantial merge conflicts when syncing back, and introduce additional ceremony that slows down frequent integration, making it less suitable for teams aiming to reduce merge conflicts and adopt continuous delivery.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to DevOps and Azure DevOps
Key term
Azure Repos
Azure Repos is a set of version control tools that allow teams to manage their source code, track changes, and collaborate on software projects using Git or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) within the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.
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.
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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.