Any disadvantages in reusing the jobs for multiple projects by passing parameters from the preceding job

[Krishna Desiraju]

Could anyone please help to see if there are any potential disadvantages with this approach

In our scenario, where we have multiple projects which get added frequently, we wanted to minimize the effort of creating jobs, so we thought of reusing the jobs with different parameters. And we are using pipelines and parametrized trigger plugins in order to achieve this dependency between the jobs. Here in our case, we have startup, build, test and deploy jobs setup as a pipeline. Startup job is to just accept parameters to trigger the downline jobs such as source code location and common workspace for subsequent jobs. For every new project, we are adding a new startup job with different parameters and triggering the build job which is common for all the projects with parameters being different.

Appreciate if anyone can suggest potential disadvantages that we might encounter down the line with this approach.

Thanks in advance,
Krishna

[Martin Ba]

First: There is a Job Template Plugin, I think as part of Jenkins Enterprise

Possible downsides of your approach:

* Job history: In your main build Job, you will have a mixed up history
of the different configurations, which makes reading anything out of it
harder.

* Pipleline: You'll have only one pipleine for the different
configurations -- it may (or not) de desirable to have multiple.

cheers,
Martin