CruiseControl was created in the early 2000s when Martin Fowler wrote an article about continuous integration (CI) and its benefits. This prompted Thoughtworks to develop CruiseControl to automate the CI process on a project they were working on. CruiseControl proved popular and was adopted by many other projects, leading to the creation of connectors to integrate it with various code repositories. Over time, CruiseControl expanded to support additional programming languages through projects like CruiseControl.Net and CruiseControl.rb. While CruiseControl helped advance the practice of CI, newer tools now exist to continue improving the CI process.