Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) as an engineering practice has its roots back to the 1980's and now antiquated CVS glory days. Widespread adoption of Continuous Integration practices didnt really occur until after the introduction of Extreme Programming (XP) in the year 2000. XP identified Continuous Integration in its doctrine and continues to be evangelized through the tireless work of Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and Don Wells.

The XP approach to CI specifically advocated for trunk-based development (or very short-lived feature branches), coupled with frequent integrations into a shared mainline (daily), automatically triggered builds, unit testing, and rapid feedback loops. Since its inception, there have been many debates and heated discussions by technologists surrounding best practices, implementation strategies, and branching patterns. ThoughtWorks best describes Continuous Integration on its website via the following definition:

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development...