A release tool that is reusable, scalable, and transparent is a requirement for high magnitude development efforts. Used effectively, Jenkins Pipeline can transform a nightmare into a non-event. This talk discusses real world strategies for executing CI/CD with Maven, Git, Jira, and Jenkins Pipeline.

Development teams commonly couple their release process with the agile development cycle. This has the potential to be a time consuming and error prone process, eating away at precious development capacity. At small scale, such as a standalone open source project, the cost may be overlooked. At a grand scale, say 100+ projects across cooperating teams in a Line of Business, the effort quickly becomes unmanageable.

Hiccups in the release process that previously may have been an edge case, now have the potential to bottleneck a dependency needed by half a dozen teams. Coordinating major/minor/patch versions from master, the latest tag, or an old tag commonly result in a late night support call. Maintaining a release DAG becomes a chore. Performing releases from a development machine simply aren’t feasible. Monitoring and troubleshooting become an overnight affair. Issue tracking systems become overwhelming to work with, adding to the risk of violated process checks.

This presentation demonstrates strategies to implement a Jenkins Pipeline for releases. Such a pipeline can execute a standard Maven release process, interact with Jira in an automated fashion, leverage existing communication channels to inform teams of issues, and achieve continuous delivery.

The target audience is members of a development organization who are responsible for a release at any level.

Familiarity with Jira will be beneficial, however concepts will translate well to many similar issue tracking tools. Familiarity with Git and Maven, at an operational level, will be assumed.