It is a continuous integration tool. This is a methodology that preaches that everything that is made of development must be integrated immediately, usually several times a day. So you have the centralized project where all the developers will put their modifications where the system is tested and built in a complete way showing if something is going wrong and identifying problems as soon as they appear and not later when it can be more complicated.
When I talk about tests I mean a set of quality checks and not just unit tests.
In some cases the implementation itself ends up being simulated to make sure everything is ok.
There are those who question how useful this is. There are those who show that there are difficulties in operating in this way.
Obviously in small teams the utility becomes much smaller, but it is still possible to benefit from the automation of the complete quality check process.
Travis CI takes care of all this (if properly configured for each task, he doesn’t guess anything, it takes a lot of work all the time to get everything in order, but can save a lot of work too) and it communicates with several other tools that help team software development. He alone does nothing.
It controls the flow of the source repository, the build of the solution, various tests, unit, integration, load, performance, static and dynamic, creates documentation, simulates or even prepares the deploy, eventually even opens tickets of bug.
A competitor talks about IC in Portuguese.
Article by IBM.
About Travis CI in Portuguese.
I found very useful the way to explain and the warning that continuous integration may not be beneficial. + 1
– Piovezan
When it is said that it is a whole set of tests and not only unitary, I believe that it makes sense to include in particular the integration tests.
– Piovezan