Jenkins - Best Open-Source Continuous Integration Software on the market
November 28, 2018
Jenkins - Best Open-Source Continuous Integration Software on the market
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Jenkins
The engineering team at several of my previous companies used Jenkins as a Continuous Integration and Automation tool. We used it for managing deployments of our applications across various environments, as well as a way to manually run various operations, such as running Tests or Invoking scripts. Jenkins has some good user permissions, that allow us to delegate specific responsibilities to various individuals without worry of someone doing something they shouldn't be allowed to. The setup is quite simple, and the software is very intuitive to use.
- Continuous Integration - A commit into a Git code repository can kick off a Jenkins job, which in turn runs a Test suite and an application deployment
- History - View of everything that's been run and by whom
- Flexible - Tons of plugins that allows Jenkins to integrate with other software/tools used in your companies tech stack
- Sometimes, plugins are needed for even basic tasks. It would be nice if the base functionality included more, so you don't need to search and install a bunch of plugins.
- The UI can be a little clunky. Although there is a Blue Ocean project that rethinks the UI of Jenkins and is much nicer.
- While the user management works, it is a little naive. You cannot do things in bulk or things that are TOO complex.
- Time - No longer need to manually run deploys, test scripts, etc. since Jenkins will do it automatically for you.
- Resources (People) - Automating tasks requires less things needing to be done, thus not requiring as many developers
- Code Quality - Because of continuous integration and automation capabilities, we can put quality checks into the workflow and run tests to make sure things are working and don't break (without needing to do any extra work)
Jenkins has been my favorite continuous integration tool I've used. It's easy to setup, intuitive to use, and very powerful. The software allows for building complex workflows, then having them run without thinking about it. This leads to savings in time and resources, and to better code quality. In my opinion, other tools offer similar capabilities, but in a partial or more complicated way.