Continuous integration

Continuous integration is a software development best practice that distributed teams use more and more as a way to mitigate integration problems and facilitate more rapid development of cohesive software. We have seen various aspects of Team Source Control, collaboration, work items, planning, and release management in Rational Team Concert. We will now see ways to manage continuous integration with the help of the Rational Team Concert build toolkit. The following is a quote by Martin Fowler about Continuous Integration:

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently; usually each person integrates at least daily, leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software...