A development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and integrated into the main codebase frequently, typically multiple times per day. This helps catch integration problems early and ensures the codebase remains stable.
From 'continuous' meaning uninterrupted and 'integration' from Latin 'integratus.' The practice was formalized in the 1990s as part of Extreme Programming, emphasizing frequent integration to avoid the pain of large, infrequent merges.
Continuous integration is like having a robot quality inspector that never sleeps - every time someone adds code, it automatically checks that everything still works together! It's the difference between finding out your code broke something immediately versus discovering it weeks later when it's much harder to fix.
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