Chapter 5. Discovering Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is one agile technique for software engineering that aims to improve software quality and reduce the time taken to integrate changes by continuously applying integration and testing frequently, as opposed to the more traditional approach of integrating and testing at the end of the development cycle.

Continuous integration has received a broad adoption, and a proliferation of commercial tools and open source projects is a clear demonstration of its success. That is not very difficult to understand, as anybody who during their professional career has participated in a software development project using a traditional approach is very likely to have experienced the so-called integration hell, where the time it takes to integrate the changes exceeds the time it took to make the changes. Does this remind you of anything?On the contrary, continuous integration is the practice of integrating changes frequently and in...