I spent quite a while grappling with Jenkins pipelines, and while it definitely has its warts, once you get over the hump and get one pipeline the way you want

I spent quite a while grappling with Jenkins pipelines, and while it definitely has its warts, once you get over the hump and get one pipeline the way you want it, it's quite easy to use it as a starter for other projects. Personally I go to great lengths to minimise the plugin dependencies and push the logic into bash scripts or Maven/Gradle. The Jenkinsfile just calls the bash scripts, so I can run it before I change it. Where I use plugins in the pipeline I document what they are and what they do in case we ever need to go from scratch. It is hard to test but the linter picks up quite a lot of errors before push, and if you're doing a multi-branch pipeline you can just test your changes by pushing to your own branch. It's a long cycle, but the variation should go down the more you have them. It has also been indispensable as an ad-hoc task scheduler. For example, I have a job that cleans up old branch artifacts every Saturday night. It was easy to alert on failures and see the results and history of past runs. I don't know anything else that would have fit the bill. When you make software over 10 years old in such a fast-changing environment, the legacy of the software can weigh you down. I've worked on similar products that were tied to their legacy counterparts (sharing a database), and every change meant carrying the baggage of backwards compatibility with the legacy platform. If I could do it all again, I'd have done it the Basecamp way: Get a clean break from the legacy version, and have a migration path to the new system. I would like to see CloudBees take all they've learned over the years, take the great work they've done on Blue Ocean and their core job scheduling system and put it all together without carrying the history with it.