They keys, in my book, are to avoid plugins absolutely anywhere possible. Don't allow your Jenkins Master to create the Jenkins Slaves -- instead create the sl

They keys, in my book, are to avoid plugins absolutely anywhere possible. Don't allow your Jenkins Master to create the Jenkins Slaves -- instead create the slaves via the same tooling your create the master, and register them with the master via the same (or similar) discovery mechanisms you use elsewhere in your environment. Don't use plugins that configure your build tool of choice. Yes, it's initially spiffy that you can click around and change ant's behavior, but when things break you can almost never repro manually. Shell steps. Shell steps. Shell steps. Make sure it's trivial to manually execute any step in the pipeline. It should be rare that you actually manually execute the step, but it helps you avoid landing in situations where it's impossible to debug the Jenkins build, because your plugin or non-shell step insists on cleaning up after itself in a manner you can't manually override. Finally, read this before even getting started: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313 Once you've read it, read it again.