Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.

By integrating regularly, you can detect errors quickly, and locate them more easily. Because you’re integrating so frequently, there is significantly less back-tracking to discover where things went wrong, so you can spend more time building features.

Continuous Integration is cheap. Not integrating continuously is expensive. If you don’t follow a continuous approach, you’ll have longer periods between integrations. This makes it exponentially more difficult to find and fix problems. Such integration problems can easily knock a project off-schedule, or cause it to fail altogether.

Continuous Integration brings multiple benefits to your organization:

• Say goodbye to long and tense integrations
• Increase visibility enabling greater communication
• Catch issues early and nip them in the bud
• Spend less time debugging and more time adding features
• Build a solid foundation
• Stop waiting to find out if your code’s going to work
• Reduce integration problems allowing you to deliver software more rapidly