Continuous integration is best described as what practice?

• A. Automatically building and testing code on every change to catch issues early.
• B. Manually building code once a month.
• C. Only run tests in production.
• D. Store builds in a separate server without tests.

Answer: (A)

Continuous integration is the practice of automatically building and testing code whenever changes are made, so issues are caught early. By having a CI system trigger a fresh build and run the full test suite on every commit or pull request, you get rapid feedback that the latest code still works with the rest of the project. This keeps the main branch in a releasable state and helps surface integration problems before they become bigger, harder-to-fix bugs.

This approach is far more effective than manually building code only once a month, which delays discovering problems and lets defects accumulate. It also isn’t about running tests in production, since tests should validate changes in a controlled environment before deployment. And storing builds without tests wastes the purpose of CI, which is to verify behavior and correctness through automated testing.