Continuous Integration

In college, I was working on a critical steganography (image watermarking) project and simultaneously developing a module on my home computer, where I integrated my changes with other changes on the college server. Most of my time was wasted in integration. After manual integration, I would find everything broken; so, integration was terrifying.

When CI is not available, development teams or developers make changes to code and then all the code changes are brought together and merged. Sometimes, this merge is not very simple; it involves the integration of lots of conflicting changes. Often, after integration, weird bugs crop up and a working module may start to fail, as it involves a complete rework of numerous modules. Nothing goes as planned and the delivery is delayed. As a result, the predictability, cost, and customer service are affected.

CI is an XP concept. It was introduced to prevent integration issues. In CI, developers commit the code periodically, and every...