The Cycle Appliance provides a platform that facilitates continuous testing and continuous integration through cloud-based infrastructure running Jenkins in Azure. A key aspect of continuous testing and continuous integration is giving your developers and testers notifications on the status of test and integration builds. This allows teams to stay up-to-date on the progress of tasks and allows faster project cycle time.

For many teams, Jira is a primary source for planning and communication. Jenkins pipelines provide the ability to send updates to Jira upon a completed execution. This article describes an example of configuring Jenkins to send a detailed message to Slack at the end of a Pipeline run.

Example Scenario

For the example in this article, we will assume there are tests associated with new functionality that is being developed. Those tests are on a development branch of a code repository.

Upon the first pipeline execution, a test case fails and Jenkins posts an update to the related Jira task specifying the execution failed. After rectifying the issue, a subsequent pipeline execution passes and Jenkins posts an update to Jira confirming the passing tests.

Jenkins Pipeline Syntax

We will be using several options available to us in Jenkinsfile syntax to drive our pipeline test execution. Detailed information on Jenksinfile pipeline syntax and usage can be found here.

post and always/success/failure

The post section of a pipeline runs at the end of the pipeline’s execution. This is where posting execution results typically happens. Inside the post section, different actions can be taken based on the success of failure status of the test execution. Some actions may need to happen at the end of every execution. Those actions should be placed inside of the always block within the post section.

jiraSendBuildInfo

The Atlassian Jira Software Plugin, which is installed with the Cycle Appliance, provides the ability to send an execution status update to a Jira task. 

Example Post Syntax

post {
   always {
     jiraSendBuildInfo site: 'YOUR-ORGINIZATION.atlassian.net'
   }
   success {
     script {
       println "All the tests passed."
     }
   }
   failure {
       println "There are some failing tests."
   }
 }

In the example above, the post block will run after the completion of preceding stages in the pipeline. The always block will run no matter the result of the pipeline’s execution. If those stages passed, the script in the success block will print out that all the tests passed; however, if the preceding stages failed then the script in the failure block will print out that some tests are failing.

Since the jiraSendBuildInfo plugin call is within the always block, every time the pipeline executes, a status update will be sent to the respective Jira issue at the defined site’s Jira.

Sending Updates to the Correct Jira Issue

The Atlassian Jira Software Plugin takes care of most everything behind the scenes, leaving very little configuration needed in the pipeline. The one required configuration is the Atlassian url for the respective orginization’s Jira. At the moment, only one site can be set.

Once the plugin has determined the correct site to send the update to, it then has two ways to determine what specific Jira issue to update. The recommended way is proper source control branch naming by including the Jira issue’s ID in the branch name. For example, “TYN-1234-Inbnd-Checking” where “TYN-1234” is the respective Jira issue’s ID. The plugin automatically parses out the ID from that branch name and sends the update to that Jira issue. The plugin does give the option of defining the branch parameter, for example “branch: TYN-1234”, when calling the jiraSendBuildInfo; however, the recommended method is having the ID in the branch name being executed, as no changes need to be made to the pipeline in order for the results to be sent to the correct issue.