out of the box jenkins provides a mechanism where you can kick off one job once the current job has been completed. you can chain several up and downstream jobs so that a build pipeline can be created. this is ideal if you have a workflow where you have a build job and then want to run a test job immediately after the build. this functionality is great, but a little limiting.

for example, let’s say that you have a workflow like this:

if you want to deploy your code, you want to ensure that your code:

in jenkins, you can set all of these upstream jobs so that once you run job 1, it’ll trigger job 2, 3, and 4. but what if you want a different workflow? what if you want to run job 1 on every commit but not do anything else? what if you want some of your jobs to depend on others, but not necessarily always be triggered from some job all the time?

the jenkins parameterized trigger plugin comes to the rescue. with this plugin, you can tell jenkins that the current job has a prerequisite that another job needs to be successful and you can block the current job’s execution until its dependencies are met.

now when we trigger the build code job, we’ll make sure that the static code analysis passes, then build, the project, and then run test automation. if any of the jobs fail, the pipeline won’t continue.

additionally, we can now have job 1 trigger on every commit and not have to worry about wasting resources and kicking off builds just because someone committed some code to the repository.