Continuous Integration Discipline
The behavioural commitments that make CI a defect-detection system rather than a build server that runs tests.
Owning a CI tool is not practising CI. The practice is four commitments, and dropping any one of them collapses the value of the rest.
Everyone integrates to trunk at least daily, in small changes. The build and test suite run on every integration. A broken trunk is fixed immediately and takes priority over new work. And the suite is trustworthy — fast enough that people wait for it, and deterministic enough that a red result is believed.
That last point is where most implementations die. A suite with flaky tests trains the team to re-run rather than investigate, and once "just re-run it" is the reflex, the system no longer detects anything; it has become a slow random number generator with a veto. Flaky tests are therefore a delivery emergency, not a backlog item — quarantine them out of the gating suite the day they are identified, and fix or delete them on a clock.
The useful diagnostic question for any team claiming to do CI: what is the median time from a broken trunk to a green trunk? If the answer is measured in hours, the practice is not in place.