Microsoft DevOps Engineer Expert AZ-400 Practice Question

Cycle time measures the duration from when work begins on an item (e.g., when its state changes to 'Active') until it is completed. To calculate this metric for historical trends, a data source that records daily snapshots of work item states is required. The Azure DevOps Analytics 'Work Item Snapshot' view (and the corresponding WorkItemSnapshot entity in the OData feed) is designed for this purpose. It stores a daily snapshot of every work item, which allows Power BI to calculate the time spent between specific state transitions and aggregate these values over time. This entity supports the required grouping by Area Path and filtering by Work Item Type.

The 'Current Work Items' view only exposes the latest revision of each work item, so it lacks the historical data needed for trend calculations. The 'Work Item History' view tracks every single field change, making it overly granular and inefficient for calculating aggregate metrics like average cycle time; it is better suited for detailed auditing. The 'Legacy FlowFields' view is part of the deprecated Data Warehouse and is not available for Azure DevOps Services (cloud).