Jenkins shows no changes between a failed build (with changes) and the successful build that follows

[John O'Brien]

I had a user of our Jenkins system pose the following problem to me:

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1. A new build is started with changes. 
2. Note the changes are documented in the build description on Jenkins.
3. Build fails in this scenario
4. Start a new build

Result: New build shows no changes. Technically it does have changes as there hasn't been a successful build with the changes yet.

This situation has lead to a lot of miscommunication between PMs/QA and engineering as we are utilizing the Jenkins post build script to update tickets with build numbers.

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I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to what could be causing this and wanted to reach out to the community. 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions! 

-John

[Mark Waite]

The git plugin (as one example) reports changes (by default) from the preceding build, independent of the status of the preceding build.  I prefer it that way because then the commit which fixed a broken build is obviously the only change shown in the list of changes.

There is a setting in the git plugin which will allow the plugin to always compute changes against a specific branch.  I use that setting in those cases where I'm using a job to evaluate a proposed change to a base branch.

Mark Waite

[John O'Brien]

I should have probably noted that we're using the JIRA Plugin for this case, where we're hoping to update each ticket in JIRA once a build succeeds. This works great when the build succeeds at first, but when it fails it doesn't show changes on the next run through. 

That might provide some additional context