What is Continuous Integration (CI)?
Options
- Merging all the code of the whole team together once a month
- Automatically building and testing every change pushed to the repo (Correct option)
- Deploying directly from a developer laptop straight to production
- Writing the documentation of each release before it is shipped
Answer
Automatically building and testing every change pushed to the repository, so problems are found quickly
Why
With CI, every push or pull request triggers an automated pipeline (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI): install, lint, run tests, build.
If something fails, the author knows within minutes, while the change is still fresh in their head, and broken code does not reach the main branch.
Developers integrate small changes often instead of huge merges.
Remember
CI = every change is built and tested automatically.