Are you tired of manually developing, testing, and deploying your code? Do you want to improve your development workflow and detect errors earlier? Jenkins is the capable open-source tool you should turn to accomplish it. We'll be delving into Jenkins and how it can help you advance your software development in this blog.

Why Jenkins?

Before Jenkins pipelines, life for developers was much more tedious and time-consuming. Instead of relying on a single tool to automate the entire software development process, developers had to rely on a variety of tools and scripts to handle each task.

Previously, developers had to manually build their code whenever they made a change. This meant that if they wanted to test their code, they had to first build it before running the tests. If there were any errors or bugs, they had to go back and fix them before rebuilding the code and repeating the process. Testing was also done manually. Every time a change was made, developers had to run tests manually, which was time-consuming and error-prone. If a test failed, they had to investigate what went wrong, which could take a long time and effort.

Software deployment was also a manual process. Developers had to manually copy and paste their code into various environments, including development, staging, and production. This was a dangerous process because it was easy to make mistakes and deploy the incorrect code to the incorrect environment. In short, Before Jenkins pipelines, life for developers was much more tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. To handle each task, they had to rely on a variety of different tools and scripts, and there was no easy way to automate the entire software development process.

After Jenkins came into the picture

Jenkins is like the trusted robot butler of a wealthy estate, working tirelessly behind the scenes to handle all the tedious and repetitive tasks that developers used to dread.

And just like a butler, Jenkins can also handle the dirty work of testing and deploying the code. It runs automated tests, so developers don't have to manually run tests and fix bugs like a detective trying to solve a case. Jenkins also deploys the code to different environments, so developers don't have to manually copy and paste code like a mailman delivering packages.

How it can help you

Assuming you are an individual developer who creates projects for the sake of fun and learning, your typical workflow for deploying it must be pushing the source code to GitHub, generating a build, testing the build, and deploying it to the server if the build is stable. Now, this entire process can consume a significant amount of your valuable time, which you could have otherwise used to correct a serious error ( a missing colon probably). To save yourself the trouble, create a Jenkins CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous deployment) pipeline so that when you push changes to the GitHub repository, the project is automatically built, tested against the specified test cases, and if successful, deployed to the server.

To summarise, Jenkins is a powerful open-source tool that can assist software development teams in streamlining their workflow, detecting issues early on, and ensuring the quality of their software. It automates the process of writing, testing, and deploying code, saving developers a significant amount of time and effort.

With that being said Adios, amigos! And don't forget, if you ever need a superhero to help you automate your software development workflow, Jenkins is the one to call! Thanks for reading and we hope you have a great day!