AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement a source control strategy
Your team uses Azure DevOps and wants to enforce that all changes to the main branch go through a pull request process with at least two approvals. They also want to prevent contributors from approving their own pull requests. Which branch policy settings should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse 'Require a minimum number of reviewers' with 'Required reviewers' (a static list) or think that build validation alone satisfies the approval requirement, missing the need to explicitly disable self-approval.
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
✓
Enable 'Require a minimum number of reviewers' set to 2, and enable 'Allow users to approve their own changes' unchecked (or set to false).
It directly addresses both requirements: setting 'Require a minimum number of reviewers' to 2 enforces at least two approvals, and unchecking 'Allow users to approve their own changes' prevents contributors from approving their own pull requests. These are branch policy settings within Azure Repos that control the pull request workflow on the main branch.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable 'Check for linked work items' and 'Require a minimum number of reviewers' set to 2, and enable 'Reset code reviewer votes when new changes are pushed'.
Why it's wrong here
Requiring linked work items is unrelated to the two-reviewer policy, and resetting reviewer votes only re-evaluates approvals after new pushes; together these settings do not guarantee that at least two distinct reviewers approve the pull request.
- ✗
Add the 'main' branch to the 'Required reviewers' list and add all developers as required reviewers.
Why it's wrong here
Adding every developer as a required reviewer on the branch policy would demand approval from the entire team, effectively requiring far more than two reviewers and creating an impractical bottleneck, rather than enforcing a minimum of two.
- ✗
Enable 'Require a minimum number of reviewers' set to 2, and enable 'Build validation' with a required build.
Why it's wrong here
Build validation ensures the code compiles and passes tests, but it does not control who approves the PR; even with a minimum of two reviewers, a developer could still approve their own changes unless self-approval is explicitly disabled.
- ✓
Enable 'Require a minimum number of reviewers' set to 2, and enable 'Allow users to approve their own changes' unchecked (or set to false).
Why this is correct
Setting the minimum reviewers to two forces at least two approvals, while unchecking 'Allow users to approve their own changes' prevents the author from counting as one of them, thereby enforcing authentic peer review from two distinct eligible reviewers.
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
Branch
A branch is a pointer to a specific commit in a version control system that allows you to work on features or fixes in isolation from the main codebase.
About these practice questions
One of 823 original AZ-400 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. 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.