Integration testing is a type of software testing where individual components of an application are combined and tested as a group. This type of testing aims to validate the interactions between subsystems or modules of an application to ensure that they work together as expected. The other options describe different aspects or types of testing: automated frameworks may or may not be used in integration testing (B), manual intervention is not inherently required (C), validating an application use case is broader than integration testing (D), and validating individual elements refers more to unit testing (E).