Pipeline-Authoring SIG Update

Published on 3/2/2020 by Marky Jackson

    What is the Pipeline-Authoring Special Interest Group

    This special interest group aims to improve and curate the experience of authoring Jenkins Pipelines. This includes the syntax of `Jenkinsfile`s and shared libraries, code sharing and reuse, testing of Pipelines and shared libraries, IDE integration and other development tools, documentation, best practices, and examples.

    What Are The Focus Areas of the Pipeline-Authoring Special Interest Group

    • Syntax - How `Jenkinsfile`s and shared libraries are written.

    • Code sharing and reuse - Shared libraries and future improvements.

    • Testing - Unit and functional testing of `Jenkinsfile`s and shared libraries.

    • IDE integration, editors, and other development tools - IDE plugins, visual editors, etc.

    • Documentation - Reference documentation, tutorials, and more.

    • Best practices - Defining, maintaining, and evangelizing best practices in Jenkins Pipeline.

    • Examples - Real-world `Jenkinsfile`s and shared libraries demonstrating how to utilize various features of Pipeline, as well as basic or starter `Jenkinsfile`s for common patterns that can be used as jumping-off points by new users.

    What Have We Been Up To

    With the start of a new year, members got together to discuss the roadmap for 2020. During the initial discussions we determined that it would be good to examine the goals of previous meetings and determine the best path forward.

    A mutual decision was made that to better create a roadmap; we needed to understand better who we were aiming to help. We decided that creating personas was very beneficial. Personas are fictional characters, which we are creating based upon our research to represent the different user types that might use Jenkins pipelines. Creating personas can help us step out of ourselves. It can help us to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help us to identify with the user we are building the roadmap for. Personas make the task at hand less complicated, they guide our ideation processes, and they can help us to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for our target user group. A lot of that work can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CdyzJwt50Wk3uUNsLMl2d4w2MGYss-phqet0s-KjbEs/edit The idea is to map the personas to a maturity model and then map the maturity model to the actual documentation. That maturity model can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ByzWlPU0j1qM_gqspJppkNKkR5ZVLWlB/view

    How Can I Get Involved

    We have been meeting regularly to define personas to help us better create the SIG roadmap. We meet twice a week, once on Thursday for the EMEA timezone and once on Friday for the US timezone. Meeting notes can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EhWoBplGl4M8bHz0uuP-iOynPGuONjcz4enQm8sDyUE/edit# and the calendar, if you would like to attend, is here: https://jenkins.io/event-calendar/. The previous recording of the meetings are located here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz_kPpb9C1w&list=PLN7ajX_VdyaOKKLBXek6iG8wTS24Ac7Y3

    Next Steps

    We have a lot of work to do and could use your help. If you would love to join us, check out the meeting link. If you would like to check out the personas and give feedback, also check out the link. Once we have wrapped up the personas work, we will start to identify the available documentation and ensure we have adequate documentation with the help of the Doc SIG. We will finally then start working to build out tools to help the community with pipelines in Jenkins better.

    Contact Us

    If you would like to get in touch with the Pipeline-Authoring SIG, you can by joining the Pipeline-Authoring SIG gitter channel or via the Pipeline-Authoring SIG mailing list

    About the Author
    Marky Jackson
    		Marky Jackson

    Hi! Super happy you found me here. I’m Marky Jackson and I am a lover of family, friends and a die-hard San Francisco Giants fan. I left my heart in San Francisco in the summer of 2020 and now reside in San Diego, California. I am a senior software engineer at Equinix Metal working on the Tinkerbell project. I am a graduate student studying Data Science & Machine Learning under Michal Fabinger. I was previously a Jenkins Goverence Board as well as the Jenkins Events Officer, a Kubernetes Org member, a Kubernetes Release Manager Associate, a Continuous Delivery Foundation Ambassador, a Jenkins core contributor, a Jenkins Google Summer of Code org admin and mentor, a Google Summer of Docs org admin and mentor, and helped with software development and community management on the Ortelius Project. I have had profiles in the CNCF and other mediums. In the past I have spoken publicly and enjoyed writing blogs on technical topics. Previously, I was named the Most Valuable Jenkins Advocate. Finally, I was previously a mentoring lead within the Kubernetes project as well as a previous Kubernetes Outreachy coordinator for the Kubernetes project.

    You can find me on Twitter @markyjackson5 In January 2021, I decided to step back from open-source projects for the foreseeable future and focus on mental health, family, work and graduate school.