Continuous Integration is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their work into a central repository. When code is committed, an automated build is triggered to check that new code does not break the existing code base. There are typically five stages of adopting Continuous Integration: 1) a few manual commits and builds, 2) nightly automated builds, 3) builds triggered with every commit, 4) code quality metrics added to builds, 5) automated deployment to staging environments. Continuous Integration helps catch bugs early in the development process and ensures code quality.