What is continuous integration and what are its benefits?
Continuous integration refers to the build and unit testing stages of the software release process. Every revision that is committed triggers an automated build and test. With continuous delivery, code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, often known as CI/CD, have become an essential aspect of software development and the DevOps lifecycle. Open source CI/CD tools are developed to assist users in automating the procedures between a developer checking in code and releasing that code into production.
CI and CD stand for continuous integration and continuous delivery/continuous deployment. In very simple terms, CI is a modern software development practice in which incremental code changes are made frequently and reliably.
This is by far the best explanation I have read so far.
At its simplest, it is simply a mechanism that rebuilds your project whenever a check in is made into some revision control system (CVS etc). This can be extended though to include running tests, all the way through to generating a CD image, mounting it within VMs, installing the product and running full tests on it.
It has the simple advantage of highlighting when code changes break the system as early as possible. Not only does it detect breaks in the code, it highlights who caused the break. This psychological effect is very effective in encouraging good testing prior to check in!
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