Job chaining and build pipelines

It's often useful to be able to chain jobs together. In its simplest form, this works by triggering a second job in the event that the first job finishes successfully. Several jobs can be cascaded this way in a chain. Such a build chain is quite often good enough for many purposes. Sometimes, a nicer visualization of the build steps as well as greater control over the details of the chain is desired.

In Jenkins terminology, the first build in a chain is called the upstream build, and the second one is called the downstream build.

While this way of chaining builds is often sufficient, there will most likely be a need for greater control of the build chain eventually. Such a build chain is often called a pipeline or workflow.

There are many plugins that create improved pipelines for Jenkins, and the fact that there are several shows that there is indeed a great desire for improvements in this area.

Two examples are the multijob plugin and the workflow plugin.

The...