About Continuous Integration
CI is the practice of teams making continuous, incremental changes to a FPGA/ASIC/embedded/IOT design’s code base, thereby providing higher quality, more predictable releases. Code is automatically and frequently built and tested to ensure high quality, bug-free systems. To achieve this, the code base is worked on simultaneously and regularly updated by all members of the team, sometimes as often as multiple times a day.
Version control systems, such as Git are mandatory for managing these changes. The entire system then undergoes a series of builds and tests known as a workflow. Since tests are a crucial part of CI, developers must keep tests up-to-date and constantly add tests as an application progresses. This provides higher quality releases than when testing is left until the end of development.
The benefits of Continuous Integration
By adopting CI, developers can accelerate their time to market, even as the complexity of their systems grow. Adopting CI leads to higher quality, more predictable releases. It will also show how CI reduces communication overhead and keeps teams integrated and efficient. CI also provides benefits to the individual developer by reducing the need for them to maintain their own developer environments and instead, focus on exploring the design space.