This article, by John Smart of Atlassian, discusses four aspects of continuous integration and automated builds that offer the potential to increase the utility of these common agile practices.
An effective Continuous Integration environment can save your team time, money and even existential angst. It can enable bugs to be discovered earlier, their cause identified more easily, and ultimately get them resolved more efficiently. It can encourage better source code management practices, help you leverage automated analysis tools, encourage better testing, track your progress and remove bottlenecks from your developers lives. It can facilitate the deployment process, and make your releases go more smoothly and more reliably. Managers will have more charts than they know what to do with and developers will be happier. To put it another way, not using Continuous Integration is like developing software using Notepad, it's possible but it's horribly inefficient.
Continuous communication flow, effective build process, code quality, and automated deployment are the four issues covered in this article.
Read John Smart's Where To Now With Build Automation? - The Future of CI Best Practices, contributed by Atlassian Software, to better understand this topic.