Why Compatibility Testing for Plugins is Crucial

You've built your Jenkins plugin. It works like a charm. You have a very nice graph of dependencies, great test coverage and you are sure this plugin is going to make the life of sooo many Jenkins users better.

And you are right, for a while. One day you receive a bug report, something is failing. But your tests work perfectly fine. Then you realize...the user upgraded some of your plugin's dependencies, and that broke your plugin.

Or maybe you are making changes to your plugin. You know many others use it as a dependency for other plugins, but you do not know exactly who. You want to be sure you are not breaking anyone else's plugin ... But you cannot review so many plugins' code...

The solution to both cases is the Plugin Compat Tester , also know as PCT. With PCT, you can get insight into:

• Are the changes I implement going to break other plugins?

• Is my plugin going to work with a configurable set of plugin versions?

In others words, the PCT allows you to perform compatibility testing between plugins at a binary level easily.

Come to my talk "What is the PCT and Why Should I Care?" at DevOps World | Jenkins World in Nice, France, October 22 to 25 to learn more about PCT, how it works, and how can you use it. You can register using the code JWRARABAOLAZA to get a 20% discount.

No plugin is an island!