Continuous Integration – the practice of automatically building and testing your project several times a day – was popularized by Martin Fowler in this article: http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html

"Software development is full of best practices which are often talked about but seem to be rarely done. One of the most basic, and valuable, of these is a fully automated build and test process that allows a team to build and test their software many times a day. The idea of a daily build has been talked about a lot. McConnnell recommends it as a best practice and it's been long known as a feature of the Microsoft development approach. We agree with the XP community, however, in saying that daily builds are a minimum. A fully automated process that allows you to build several times a day is both achievable and well worth the effort."

Topics in the article:

• The Benefits of Continuous Integration
• The More Often the Better
• What Is a Successful Build?
• Single Source Point
• Automated Build Scripts
• Self-Testing Code
• The Master Build
• Checking in
• Summing up