Continuous integration (
CI) is the practice, in
software engineering, of merging all developer working copies to a shared
mainline several times a day. It was first named and proposed by
Grady Booch in
his 1991 method, although Booch did not advocate integrating several times a day. It was adopted as part of
extreme programming (XP), which did advocate integrating more than once per day, perhaps as many as tens of times per day.