AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement a source control strategy
Your team uses GitHub Flow and wants to ensure that every pull request is reviewed by at least one team member. Which branch protection rule should you enable?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse 'requiring status checks' (automated validation) with 'requiring pull request reviews' (human validation), leading them to select option C instead of A.
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 pull request before merging and set required number of reviewers to 1
GitHub Flow relies on pull requests for collaboration, and the 'Require a pull request before merging' rule with a required number of reviewers set to 1 enforces that every PR must be reviewed by at least one team member before it can be merged. This directly satisfies the requirement of ensuring code review for all changes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Require a pull request before merging and set required number of reviewers to 1
Why this is correct
Requiring a pull request before merging and setting the required number of reviewers to 1 ensures every change is proposed via a PR and must receive at least one human approval before merge. This directly enforces the code review requirement by blocking merges until a reviewer explicitly approves the pull request.
- ✗
Require signed commits
Why it's wrong here
Requiring signed commits verifies the identity and authenticity of the author via GPG or S/MIME signatures, but it does not mandate that a second person has reviewed the code. Signed commits prove who made the change, not that anyone else examined it, so they cannot satisfy a peer-review requirement.
- ✗
Require status checks to pass before merging
Why it's wrong here
Requiring status checks to pass before merging enforces that automated CI/CD workflows (e.g., build, unit tests, linting) succeed, but those checks do not involve human judgment or review. This ensures technical validation, not a code review by a peer.
- ✗
Require conversation resolution before merging
Why it's wrong here
Requiring conversation resolution before merging only closes open comment threads on a pull request, and these comment threads can be resolved by the author without any reviewer approval. It does not mandate a dedicated reviewer or their sign-off, so it does not enforce human code review.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Managing Infrastructure as Code Using Azure
Key term
Pull request
A pull request is a way for a developer to propose changes to a codebase and ask other team members to review and merge them into the main project.
Key term
GitHub
GitHub is a cloud-based platform for storing, tracking, and collaborating on code using Git version control.
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.