Maciej Zawadzki – Building Zone: November 2003 (Part 2 of 2)
In this second installment, we will try to answer the following question: How and why has continuous integration impacted build management? We took a pretty good look at continuous integration in last month's column. We pointed out that the main idea behind continuous integration is to merge changes into a common code line as often as possible. Why? To lessen the pain of merging two or more code lines. Continuous integration makes the assumption that the difficulty of merging two or more code lines is proportional to the length of time they have been diverging.