What is Continuous Integration?

Key Takeaways

hi folks my name is alex sharma i'm a developer advocate at circle ci and i am here today to talk to you about continuous integration which is a software development practice where everyone on the engineering team is continuously integrating these small code changes back into the code base after each change that they're making there's a suite of tests that runs automatically that checks the code for any bugs or errors or anything like that um cool so what does that look like in practice i've drawn this beautiful flow chart up here for you step one is you make a change and this is something maybe on github you make a future branch you push it up submit a pull request that's the change that i'm talking about here okay push that up then you run your tests automatically and that's that's pretty important uh the tests need to be run in a consistent way so that everyone on your team has full confidence that they're running the tests in the same way you don't really have a guarantee that your machine is the same as you know your neighbor's machine that's that's really hard to to lock down so those tests are running automatically somewhere else if they pass right if they pass you're good to go and you can just keep making changes right you go right back around submit another pull request go wild if the tests fail you need to make sure it's your responsibility to fix the code okay fix the code until your tests pass and then you can continue developing so it's this wonderful cycle the idea being that you want to catch these bugs as soon as you can right so they're not lingering over a long period of time so that's what continuous integration is and next time we'll talk about why you would be doing this we'll dig into that thanks