In one way or another, continuous integration touches upon all the other topics we covered in this book. You will see and use all the tools that we learned about and you will be able to put them to good use. Let's briefly review the tools themselves and take a look at how we will use them for CI.
I'm hoping that the chapter on source code and version control already showed you the benefits of using such systems. In connection with CI, a source code repository becomes important because it contains a central and authoritative copy of the source code that we will need to actually build the project. This task would be impossible to automate if all the changes to the project were to reside on the machines of different developers or if they were not centrally accessible.
Our choice of a source and version control system has been Subversion. Any tools with comparable features (CVS, Perforce, and so on) will work as well, however, if you are planning...