Continuous integration is a core DevOps practice. It consists of continuously integrating and testing changes made to an application's source code. Each developer adds his or her code commit to the current development branch on the version control system. The code is then automatically compiled, tested and deployed in a test environment. If it passes the tests, it is considered ready for integration into the main application. This allows errors and code conflicts to be detected and corrected quickly, before it's too late. New features can also be deployed more quickly.