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.