[benjiweber]

CI != CI Servers.

CI is about continually integrating your changes with the rest of the team, and ideally it's also continuous deployment (integrating with production environment continually). The reasons for integrating regularly is to tighten the feedback loop and minimise the integration pain by doing it in frequent, small steps.

It's perfectly possible to do continuous integration without a CI server, particularly when you're also doing continuous deployment.

It's also easy to do the opposite of continuous integration using a CI server. I have seen a lot of people using a CI server to test branches in version control. They have the continuous part but not the integration part.

[rubiquity]

Good to know. So I'm actually practicing CI the way that I work, I'm just not paying some company monthly fees for a CI server. So the difference between CI the practice and "CI wink wink" is $$$.

[xorcist]

Monthly fees? I don't know where you get that from. The state of the art CI tool, Jenkins, is actually free software.

What there is to a complete CI process depends on what your release process is, apart from the build process. There may be code signings, integration with external services etc. These are steps that are not part of the individual developers build process.

The letter I in CI stands for integration. Two checkins might very well look good on their own, but cause havoc with other systems.

[jipiboily]

My 2 cents here, but I think hosting fees will be higher with Jenkins than small CI plans...there are free offerings and even the paid one starts with pretty cheap prices that makes it hard for me to justify even an hour of work configuring a server for that. That said, I know this is not how everyone is thinking.