Continuous integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in or branch is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early on, ensuring the main code branch is always viable and production-ready.
CI is designed to support many small, iterative changes rather than fewer, large changes. It helps teams scale through automated workflows for code builds, testing, merging, and checking into shared repositories.