What is Continuous Integration?

Continuous Integration is a buzzword these days. But many people don’t understand what it means.

How can I make this claim?

I recently did this poll with a group of software developers:

Raise your hand if your team does Continuous Integration.

85% of the room raised their hand.

Then I spent just a couple minutes defining and explaining continuous integration, and asked the same question again.

Now only half of the room raised their hands.

The misconception that CI means automated tests, or perhaps a tool that runs automated tests, is common. And it’s made worse by countless tools, and even companies, whose names propagate this fallacy.

Both automated tests and build pipelines are amazing tools, and every team should use them. But using a tool does not mean you’re doing continuous integration, or reaping its benefits!

If you’re not using real continuous integration, you’re not reaping the benefits of reduced merge conflicts, faster feedback, and easier team collaboration.

Sign up for my free 5-day email series, What is CI? to learn what continuous integration really means, and how y ou can start to benefit from it!

And after, as a bonus, you’ll also receive The Daily Commit, my daily pipeline of DevOps inspiration and advice.