Continuous integration, or CI as it's more commonly known, is a tried-and-tested method of ensuring the software asset that is being developed builds correctly and plays nicely with the rest of the codebase. The keyword here is continuous, which, as the name implies, is as frequent as possible (ideally on each commit and/or merge to the source-control system). The simplest way to look at a CI solution is to think of it as a tool to orchestrate your build and test-automation tools—the two things we've just covered.
Yet again there are, as you may have guessed, a vast number of mature CI solutions available, both commercial and open source, so there are no excuses for not selecting one and using CI.
As mentioned, CI solutions are a very basic-level, software solution that orchestrates the execution of your build and test-automation. The execution...