AZ400-Q: reduce CI cost without reducing confidence
Dependency installation dominates a pipeline’s duration and hosted-runner cost. The team needs to improve speed without using stale unverified output. What should it do?
- A) Skip dependency integrity checks.
- B) Reuse any artifact from any branch.
- C) Disable tests on pull requests.
- D) Use a keyed dependency cache with lockfile/version invalidation, while retaining normal restore, integrity, and test steps. ✓
Answer: D. A correctly keyed cache speeds repeatable dependency retrieval without replacing validation or allowing unrelated branch output to masquerade as a dependency set.
Why not the others: Skipping checks/tests and using arbitrary artifacts harms correctness and security.