Why Continuous Integration?

What is Continuous Integration?

Continuous integration (CI) ensures that developers can integrate their changes frequently and in an automated fashion. It equally verifies every integration that is introduced and ensures that errors are identified and not shipped to the end-users.

CI guarantees the collaboration, communication, and standardization of the software development process by using mechanisms like branching, committing, pull requests, and code reviews.

Benefits of Continuous Integration

CI allows team members to work independently on different features and introduce the changes to the larger code base in small commits that can easily be reviewed for errors and then merged. As a result, code that does not compile or whose test execution fails is easily prevented from making it to the end users. When these errors are fixed, they can then be re-introduced, built again to confirm the correctness, reviewed, and then merged into the central codebase.

With a CI system in place, production issues that can bring down the entire application are also prevented. Code changes are done in small bits and are not time-consuming, and bugs don’t accumulate for a long time before they are detected.

The CI process produces a build artifact that is meant to be kept safely in a repository, be it a container repository like Docker Hub or an artifact repository like JFrog Artifactory or Nexus.