Continuous Integration otherwise known as CI is a software development practice that speeds up the time it takes to build and test software. Traditionally, developers would build their software, hand it off to a QA team to test, and wait for results to come back, and then make some fixes, and repeat this process until satisfied. The hand off and lead time between all of these points is slow, frustrating and leads to schedule delays. Instead, continuous integration relies on tools like source control, and a CI pipeline that schedules what code gets built, and tested. It is responsible for running tests automatically (the developers need to write tests, instead of having a manual QA team perform tests) and giving feedback in seconds or minutes, vs. waiting hours or days in a manual scenario. Continuous Integration has given rise to frequent website and application updates. Amazon.com is known for deploying a change to their website every 9 seconds. This can only be done through a CI process.

What do we mean by this?
Coding inspired by Chipotle’s fast casual: Fast, seamless, and collaborative.