[russell_h]

Continuous integration doesn't mean all development happens in master. A policy that works well for me is that anything that will require more than 2 minor commits to accomplish should happen in a feature branch. If tests pass in the branch (and you probably want to insert code review/sign-off at this stage as well), merge to master. If tests pass in master, deploy.

From what I can tell, this just makes it easy to run tests in branches. My team uses something similar that kicks off a build whenever someone comments "build it" in a GitHub pull request, and posts the results to the pull request discussion.

[Ramone]

It sounds like we agree that long-lived branches are not continuous integration at least. We probably differ in that I think short-lived branches and pull requests are more overhead than most teams require. Keep in mind that CI does expect daily check-ins to master. That's how short those branches can live to satisfy that requirement. Anything else is not CI... which is not the end of the world either, but I don't see the point of using a CI server at all anymore. Just build/test your stuff locally.