Sure Jenkins is the leading continuous integration server software. Competition with it is as difficult as with Linux in general purpose server platform area. Jenkins is for general purpose too and it is the cause of some functionality omissions:
- Weak support for pipelines. I.e. build-test-QA-release, staged deployment.
- No support for parallel coding - feature branches, server side integration, pre-commit builds.
- Difficult mass configuration - shared SCM configuration, credentials, job configuration inheritance and parametrization.
- Weak traceability of user operations, no support for audit.
Well, we all implementing that yourself. There are a lot of helper plugins, but such solutions are patchy and copy-paste based.
I would argue that these functionality omissions are not really disadvantages of Jenkins. It is too general tool for such options. It would be right to treat Jenkins as a foundation for higher level solutions. A platform, see a note by Kohsuke himself (Kohsuke Kawaguchi: Writing programs that drive Jenkins). Because Jenkins is
- quite simple;
- really flexible;
- easily extensible;
- having a set of versatile APIs.
It is difficult to guess how many such uber-applications are being developed and used internally. We have one too. Next publicly available solutions should emerge - such as CloudBees Jenkins as a service, GitHub Janky. Hope these solutions will fuel Jenkins developers financially given a good balance between open source platform and custom applications will be maintained.
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