Industry Use Cases Of Jenkins

What Is Jenkins ?

Jenkins is an open-source server that is written entirely in Java. It lets you execute a series of actions to achieve the continuous integration process, that too in an automated fashion.

This CI server runs in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat. Jenkins facilitates continuous integration and continuous delivery in software projects by automating parts related to build, test, and deployment. This makes it easy for developers to continuously work on the betterment of the product by integrating changes to the project.

Jenkins automates the software builds in a continuous manner and lets the developers know about the errors at an early stage. A strong Jenkins community is one of the prime reasons for its popularity. Jenkins is not only extensible but also has a thriving plugin ecosystem.

Some of the possible steps that can be performed using Jenkins are:

• Software build using build systems such as Gradle, Maven, and more.
• Automation testing using test frameworks such as Nose2, PyTest, Robot, Selenium, and more.
• Execute test scripts (using Windows terminal, Linux shell, etc.
• Achieve test results and perform post actions such as printing test reports, and more.
• Execute test scenarios against different input combinations for obtaining improved test coverage.
• Continuous Integration (CI) where the artifacts are automatically created and tested. This aids in identification of issues in the product at an early stage of development.

At the time of what is Jenkins blog, it had close to 1500+ plugins contributed by the community. Plugins help in customizing the experience with Jenkins, along with providing support for accelerating activities related to building, deploying, and automating a project.

Jenkins Market Share and Competitors in Software Development Tools

We use the best indexing techniques combined with advanced data science to monitor the market share of over 12,500 technology products, including Software Development Tools. By scanning billions of public documents, we are able to collect deep insights on every company, with over 100 data fields per company at an average. In the Software Development Tools category, Jenkins has a market share of about 10.2%. Other major and competing products in this category include:

Top Industries that use Jenkins:

Companies using Jenkins

We have data on 59,079 companies that use Jenkins. The companies using Jenkins are most often found in United States and in the Computer Software industry. Jenkins is most often used by companies with 10–50 employees and 1M-10M dollars in revenue. Our data for Jenkins usage goes back as far as 5 years and 1 months.

If you’re interested in the companies that use Jenkins, you may want to check out Google Analytics and ASP.NET as well.

Who uses Jenkins?

Some of the companies that use Jenkins include:

Use-cases Working with tools

Jenkins has plugins for integration with common tools such as GCC, Microsoft Visual Studio, etc. Currently there are not domain-specific embedded development or electronic design automation tool integrations. Jenkins can however integrate with practically any tool which can provide a command-line interface via its shell/batch scripting integration.

These command line tools can be invoked directly, assuming the build agent being used has the appropriate environment set up. To help configure the environments, a few of the following approaches can be considered:

1. Machine-specific variables (e.g. LM_LICENSE_FILE or port specifications for peripherals) can be configured in Agent configuration in the Environment Variables section. Once the variable is modified, the build agent should be reconnected.
2. In order to integrate setup the tool environment, consider Custom Tools Plugin.
3. EnvInject plugin allows to setup custom environments at the job level.

Top 10 Uses of Jenkins

Jenkins is open-source and hence free of cost. It can be easily configured and extended. Jenkins comes with a lot of plugins which ensure great flexibility. It deploys code instantly, produces a report after deployment, shows an error in code or tests and a lot of issues are detected and resolved in almost real-time. It is also great for integration as integration is automated. The great support community is also available.

In this section, we provide the top 10 uses of Jenkins. These are provided below: –

1. Jenkins lowers the Effort of repeated coding

with the uses of Jenkins, one can convert a command prompt code into a GUI button click. This can be done by wrapping up the script as a Jenkins job. Parameterized Jenkins jobs can be created for customization or to take user input. Thus, hundreds of lines of code writing can be saved.

2. Integration of Individual Jobs

Jenkins jobs are usually small tools. They serve small purposes and quite simple. Jenkins provides pipeline plugin using which multiple jobs can be combined. Pipelining provides such benefit which Linux users can understand more than anyone. Both sequential or parallel combination is possible.

3. Synchronization with Slack

A large team uses a centralized platform for communication. Slack is one such most popular platform. Slack integration can be done to Jenkins and thus communication such as activities have been triggered, its time, users name, results etc. can be shared with other people.

4. Effortless Auditing

Jenkins jobs, when run, capture console output from stdout as well as stderr. Troubleshooting with the uses of Jenkins is also very clear. For performance tuning each individual job, run timing can be measured and slowest step can be identified using Time stamper plugin.

5. Greater data support for project management

For project management, each activity is wrapped as a Jenkins job. For each Jenkins job, success or failure can be identified, and job completion time can be measured.

Jenkins supports REST API or SDK to measure success, failure or time.

Some useful Jenkins plugins are given below:

• Pipeline Plugin,
• Slack Plugin,
• thinBackup,
• Timestamper,
• Dashboard View,
• JobConfigHistory Plugin,
• Build-timeout,
• Naginator Plugin,
• Git Plugin, and
• GitHub pulls request builder plugin.

6. Manual Tests option

Sometimes things work great locally but fail when pushed on a central system. This happens because, by the time they push, things change. Continuous Integration tests the code against the current state of a code base and is done in the production-like environment.

7. Increased Code Coverage

CI servers such as Jenkins can check code for test coverage. Tests increases code coverage. This inspires transparency and accountability in team members. Results of tests are displayed on build pipeline which ensures team member follow required guild lines. Code coverage similar to code review ensures that testing is a transparent process among team members.

8. Code deployment to Production

Jenkins or another CI system can deploy code to staging or production automatically if all the tests written for the same within a specific feature or release branch are green. This is formally known as Continuous Deployment as well. Changes before a merge activity can be made visible too. This can be done in a dynamic staging environment, and after they are merged it is deployed directly to a central staging system, pre-production system or even a production environment.

9. Avoid Broken Code during shipping

Continuous integration ensures that code coverage is good, it is tested well and only merged when all tests are successful. This makes sure that the master builds are not broken, and no broken code is shipped to a production environment. In case, the master build is broken, such systems can trigger a warning to all developers.

10. Decrease Code Review Time

CI systems such as Jenkins and Version Control System such as Git can communicate with each other and inform the users when a merge request is suitable for merge. This is usually when all the tests are passed, and all other requirements are met. In addition to that, the difference in code coverage can also be reported in the merge request itself. This dramatically reduces the time taken to review a merge request.

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