As a developer compiling code and running unit tests gives you assurance that your code changes haven’t had an impact on the existing codebase. Integrating your code changes into the source control repository enables other to validate their changes with yours. As a best practice teams integrate into the shared repository several times a day to reduce the risk of introducing breaking changes or worst overwriting each other’s.
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 verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.
The Automated build running as part of the CI process is often referred to as the CI build. While there isn't a clear definition of what the CI build should...