Continous Integration is a development methodology, not an automated process. The idea is that developers continuously merge their changes into a shared integra

Continous Integration is a development methodology, not an automated process. The idea is that developers continuously merge their changes into a shared integration branch. Having long running feature branches that get merged when they are done is a valid methodology, but it is not continuous integration; no matter what your automated build and test pipeline calls it. In practice, I have typically seen CI done with either feature freezes, or release branches to allow creating versions where everything is complete.