Teamitek

Jenkins Basics by Teamitek

Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who is a Java developer, working at SUN Microsystems, was tired of building the code and fixing errors repetitively. In 2004, he created an automation server called Hudson that automates build and test task.

In 2011, Oracle who owned Sun Microsystems had a dispute with Hudson open-source community, so they forked Hudson and renamed it as Jenkins.

Both Hudson and Jenkins continued to operate independently. But in short span of time, Jenkins acquired a lot of contributors and projects while Hudson remained with only 32 projects. Then with time, Jenkins became more popular, and Hudson is not maintained anymore.

What is Continuous Integration?

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice in which the developers are needs to commit changes to the source code in a shared repository at regular intervals. Every commit made in the repository is then built. This allows the development teams to detect the problems early.

Continuous integration requires the developers to have regular builds. The general practice is that whenever a code commit occurs, a build should be triggered.

Continuous Integration with Jenkins

Let’s consider a scenario where the complete source code of the application was built and then deployed on test server for testing. It sounds like a perfect way to develop software, but this process has many problems.

  • Developer teams have to wait till the complete software is developed for the test results.
  • There is a high prospect that the test results might show multiple bugs. It was tough for developers to locate those bugs because they have to check the entire source code of the application.
  • It slows the software delivery process.
  • Continuous feedback pertaining to things like architectural or coding issues, build failures, test status and file release uploads was missing due to which the quality of software can go down.

The whole process was manual which increases the threat of frequent failure.