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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Continuous integration

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, continuous integration means: The practice of merging small code changes into the shared main branch often, with each change automatically built and tested so problems are found early.

In Turkish: sürekli entegrasyon, CI

How it is used

Shortened to CI. 'CI' also names the system that runs the checks: 'CI is failing', 'wait for CI to pass'. Tools include GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins and CircleCI.

Example sentences

  1. Continuous integration catches most broken merges within ten minutes.

  2. Our continuous integration setup runs unit tests and a security scan on every pull request.

Common collocations

  • continuous integration server
  • CI pipeline
  • CI is green
  • wait for CI
  • CI/CDShort for continuous integration and continuous delivery (or deployment): automatically building and testing every change, then releasing it quickly and safely.
  • continuous deliveryThe practice of keeping code always ready to release, so that any tested version can go to production at the push of a button.
  • buildThe process of turning source code into a program or package that can run, or the result of that process. Also a verb: to build the project.
  • pipelineAn automated series of steps, such as building, testing and deploying, that runs every time code changes and stops if one step fails.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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