Code issues that are found sooner are both easier and cheaper to fix. Therefore, development teams strive to push code quality checks as far left into the development process as possible. As the name suggests, branch policies give you a set of out-of-the-box policies that can be applied to the branches on the server. Any changes being pushed to the server branches need to comply with these policies before the changes can be accepted. Policies are a great way to enforce your team's code quality and change-management standards. In this recipe, you'll learn how to configure branch policies on your master branch.
The out-of-the-box branch policies include several policies, such as build validation and enforcing a merge strategy. In this recipe, we'll only focus on the branch policies that are needed to set up a code-review workflow.