What is continuous integration?

In this section, we will try to answer what CI is in two basic steps. We will first attempt to define CI, and then examine its key principles.

Defining continuous integration

CI is a software development practice in which developers regularly integrate their code changes into the project’s shared work area and inspect their changes for build issues and other quality-related problems.

Integration is the act of submitting your modified code to the project’s main branch (the potential software solution). This is technically done by merging your feature branch to the main branch in a trunk-based development (a Git-based branching strategy) and, additionally, by merging the feature branch into the development branch in a Gitflow Workflow-based development (another Git-based branching strategy), as shown in the following figure:

Figure 1.1: The process of frequently integrating your changes with the main code...