Quality Control

There seems to (still) exist a great deal of confusion in many teams about the concept of continuous integration (CI).

The mighty Martin Fowler explains it in one of his seminal articles (http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html)

Wikipedia defines CI as the principle of implementing "continuous process of applying quality control" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration)

Just googling up the term produces nearly 6 million references (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=continuous+integration&btnG=Google+Search&meta=) so one might infer at least two things out of this:

1) that the topic is well covered

2) that the topic is very popular

Why, then, have I found it so difficult to find a proper implementation of continuous integration?

Perhaps it depends on what I mean by "proper implementation", so I thought about what I would really expect to receive from a "proper" CI implementation. In other words, what is the quantifiable value that a good CI process adds to my team?

My concept is very much in tune with the Wikipedia definition, in that CI is one of the many means to an end: quality control. The value of a CI process is in quality control, so it is useless if it does not deliver the means to check the quality of the deliverables.