This week, I will work on another weak link in my toolset. For the following couple blog posts, I will try to write about history and necessity of continuous integration. By doing so, I am sure I will come up with more than I expected. Currently, it’s obvious that we need continuous integration and we have solid reasons for ourselves.

We have been shaping continuous integration ever since the concept was first developed so that it would fulfill our constantly changing needs. But, what I would like to learn is;

• What was the definition of continuous integration when it was newly introduced?
• Was it the same, or did we really shaped it over time?
• Why did they need this concept at first place?

If we can answer these questions, we can understand the trade-offs we’ve done during the development process of the idea. After then we can completely understand what continuous integration is.

After today’s digging, I found out the concept strongly adopted in the Extreme Programming practices, but I couldn’t find older definitions. We have software development for more than a century now and I am sure we had this concept even before the XP, I just need to dig deeper to find out! Wouldn’t it be awesome if I could find a thesis from 60’s?