In software engineering, continuous integration ( CI ) is the practice
of merging all developers' working copies to a shared mainline several times a
day. Nowadays it is typically implemented in such a way that it triggers an
automated build with testing. Grady Booch first proposed the term CI in his
1991 method, although he did not advocate integrating several times a day.
Extreme programming (XP) adopted the concept of CI and did advocate
integrating more than once per day – perhaps as many as tens of times per day.
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