Continuous integration
CI is part of CI/CD, a practice hailing from software engineering and DevOps. CI allows developers to test their code before code is merged into production, in an automated fashion.
Integration
The term integration in CI refers to the process of combining code changes from multiple contributors into a shared unified code base. The key principle behind CI is to automate the process of merging code changes regularly and consistently, thereby reducing the risk of merge conflicts that may arise when integrating changes made by different team members.
Merge conflicts arise when code from different branches is merged, and certain code or functionality is present in one branch but not in the other, where you may have different lines of code. When you build on a separate feature branch, the code will probably have diverged from what is in the main branch.
Before code is merged to production, this could be your main or master branch in your version control...