GitHub Foundations Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

Your team has a complex branching strategy where feature branches are created from a develop branch, and hotfixes are created directly from main. A critical bug was fixed in a hotfix branch and merged to main, but the fix is now missing from develop. The develop branch has 47 commits ahead of main since the hotfix was created. What is the MOST appropriate Git strategy to ensure the hotfix is included in develop while preserving the commit history and minimizing merge conflicts?

A development team uses GitHub Actions with self-hosted runners in their private datacenter. They notice that sensitive environment variables are being exposed in workflow logs when jobs fail. The team needs to ensure secrets remain protected while maintaining the ability to debug workflow failures. Which combination of approaches provides the BEST security posture?

An enterprise organization with 500+ repositories needs to enforce that all pull requests undergo security scanning, pass specific status checks, and receive approvals from designated code owners before merging to protected branches. However, they need to allow repository administrators emergency override capabilities during critical production incidents while maintaining audit trails. What is the MOST appropriate GitHub configuration?

A team discovers that a developer accidentally committed AWS credentials to a public repository 73 commits ago across multiple branches. The credentials have been rotated, but the team needs to completely remove the sensitive data from Git history. The repository has active forks and multiple collaborators with local clones. What is the MOST comprehensive remediation strategy?

Your organization uses GitHub Enterprise Cloud with SAML SSO and has implemented IP allow lists for security. Remote developers frequently lose access when working from different locations, but the security team requires strict IP controls. Several critical repositories need to remain accessible via GitHub API for CI/CD pipelines running in dynamic cloud environments with changing IP addresses. What configuration BEST balances security requirements with operational needs?

A monorepo contains multiple microservices, each with independent deployment cycles. The team uses GitHub Actions with path filters to trigger CI/CD only for changed services. They discover that changes to shared library code in the /common directory aren't triggering rebuilds of dependent services, causing production inconsistencies. The repository has 20+ microservices with complex interdependencies. What is the MOST maintainable solution to ensure correct build triggering?

During a code review, a pull request shows 'This branch has conflicts that must be resolved' despite the fact that both branches modified completely different files. Investigation reveals that both branches reformatted the entire codebase with different linting tools, creating conflicts in every file even though logical changes don't overlap. The feature branch has 3 weeks of work. What is the BEST strategy to resolve this situation and prevent future occurrences?

An organization needs to migrate 300 repositories from Bitbucket Server to GitHub Enterprise Cloud while preserving complete history, pull requests, issues, and team permissions. The migration must minimize downtime, maintain team productivity, and ensure no data loss. Several repositories exceed 10GB in size with large file history. What is the MOST comprehensive migration approach?

A team uses GitHub Projects (new experience) to track work across 15 repositories. They need to automatically move issues to 'In Progress' when a linked branch is created, to 'In Review' when a PR is opened, to 'Testing' when specific labels are applied, and to 'Done' when merged. They also need custom fields for sprint assignments and priority scores with automated calculations. What implementation provides this automation MOST effectively?

Your organization's security policy requires that all commits to production branches are signed and verified, all contributors use hardware security keys for authentication, and a complete audit trail of all repository access and administrative actions is maintained for compliance. You're using GitHub Enterprise Cloud. A recent audit revealed gaps in enforcement and incomplete audit logs for some actions. What configuration MOST comprehensively addresses these requirements?