A brief history of Jenkins plugins

There are thousands of plugins available for Jenkins, and they cover a vast range of tasks and provide a wealth of valuable resources for the community that uses and works with Jenkins. Many of the existing plugins started out by providing simple functions and offering limited functionalities, but the majority of them have grown and developed into very mature software that offers large degrees of functionality. Many plugins have also been incorporated into Jenkins core functionality—turning them from an additional and optional add-on component to code that is shipped within Jenkins by default.

A major part of the reason for the success of Jenkins and its range of plugins is the design philosophy that was used to develop and extend Jenkins from the beginning. This approach to software development has encouraged people to work together, enabled projects to benefit from each other, and created a highly productive and collaborative community of developers and...