JUC U.S. East 2015 - Providing a First Class User Experience with Jenkins Plugins

By: Peter Vilim, Delphix

Production Jenkins installations often rely upon a large number of custom scripts and third-party plugins. While this eases initial deployment of Jenkins and allows for greater customization, it can often lead to a worse user experience and hard to debug problems - such as output failures not being properly captured in Jenkins build output. This talk will focus on experiences gained at Delphix writing Jenkins plugins. Delphix is a large user of Jenkins and thousands of builds and all testing at the company are being managed with Jenkins. Recently, work began to write internal plugins for several parts of the Jenkins build infrastructure, including the provisioning of test environments. This talk will demonstrate how these plugins provide an improved user experience - for example, by handling cancelled and failed jobs in a smoother fashion - and make some suggestions about what to focus on when writing your own plugins.