Three silent Azure DevOps stage variable pitfalls that cause pipelines to do nothing

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In multi-stage Azure DevOps pipelines, output variables from one stage can silently fail to pass their values to dependent stages due to three common mistakes. Comparing a variable's value to an unquoted boolean instead of a quoted string is valid syntax but always evaluates to false. The output variable reference path must include both the exact job name and the step's 'name' field — not its 'displayName' — or the lookup returns an empty string. Additionally, a consuming stage must explicitly declare 'dependsOn' pointing to the producing stage, otherwise the variable resolves to nothing with no error or warning. All three failures produce a green pipeline that silently skips intended work, making them harder to catch than an outright failure.

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