Monday, February 18, 2013

How Uldis got burnt today by Jenkins Build Pipeline plugin

Not going to tell you how to use it and what is it about. There is quick reference: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Build+Pipeline+Plugin

Internet is full of manuals for this plugin and even my guru Martin Fowler is recommending it. Unfortunately there is one huge problem with it - it was not meant to fit for Enterprise. Even worse, it asks you to rebuild your project everytime, if you want to work with final artefacts on different steps of pipe.

So there are two huge issues:
1) Only latest line of pipeline is actually working and tested. Of course - it is Agile way. In Enterprise it is absolutely okay to redeploy old versions again and again for different teams. Many of you will say that this is bullshit and it works just fine - yeah right! Try to do the same by adding few job parameters.
2) It can set nice build names for good-looking versioning, so even by having this nice dashboard you still spend a lot of time by trying to understand which version is in which stage.

At some point it even stopped to refresh latest data about Jobs. Disappointing... If you are pure agile - go for it and it is great but not for enterprise...

Sorry guys, best tool still is Anthill PRO and I hate that!