CloudBees
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In a large software development project, where many developers work on the same code, keeping the repository stable is a challenge. Because of sheer number of commits that land on the repository, even if the chance of accidental regression per commit is small, they compound and make the repository unstable, blocking other developers.
A traditional implementation of Jenkins, where it tests the tip of the repository, doesn’t help with this situation as regressions can be only discovered after they land on the tip of the repository.
Therefore often the "solution" to the problem is to have every developer rigorously run tests before changes are pushed to the repository, thereby wasting precious human time on test executions, which ideally should be running on the server.
The validated merge feature for Git in Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees is a plugin that solves this problem by allowing developers to push commits (called "proposed changes") to Jenkins, specifying which branch it is intended for (called "upstream ref", for example "master".) Jenkins will then build the proposed changes, verify that it is of a good quality, and then push that change to the upstream repository.
In this way, developers can now engage in the fire-and-forget style development. Once he is reasonably happy with the changes he made, he can push this into Jenkins and then move on to the next task, without waiting for a lengthy test cycle to complete. If the proposed changes are actually good, it’ll automatically land in the main repository. If not, he will get a notification.
In this way, the validated merge feature allows you to offload more work from developers and their laptops to Jenkins and its slaves.