On a large-scale project, you're going to have many developers working on many features, releases, hotfixes, and so on, at the same time. CI is the practice of integrating work from different developers continuously. This means merging code from feature branches into the dev branch, or from a release branch into master. At every integration point, there's a chance that the integration would cause something to break. Therefore, we must perform tests at these integration points, and only carry through with the integration if all tests pass.
We already do this in our current workflow, but it is done manually. By having automated builds and tests that detect errors in these integration points, it allows members of a software development team to integrate their work frequently.
By practicing CI, we can abide by the "test early, test often" mantra, and ensure bugs are identified and fixed as early as possible. It also means that at any point, we will always have a fully...
