What is a significant benefit of Continuous Integration in software development?

Continuous Integration (CI) significantly enhances the software development process by consistently integrating code changes into a shared repository, which leads to fewer integration issues. This practice allows development teams to detect and resolve conflicts early, as new code is merged frequently, often multiple times a day.

By continuously merging and testing changes, CI helps ensure that each integration builds successfully and passes established automated tests, which promotes a consistent development environment. As a result, teams can identify and address integration problems immediately, rather than at the end of the development cycle when issues can be more complex and time-consuming to resolve. This proactive approach greatly minimizes the occurrences of integration challenges, thereby streamlining the overall development process and improving team collaboration.

While other choices highlight important benefits, such as higher quality software releases and reduced time to market, the essence of Continuous Integration fundamentally focuses on minimizing integration issues by fostering a routine of smaller, manageable code changes that are tested immediately upon integration.