Jenkins would naturally be used for automatic build/deployment/testing and reporting activities. However, would it be a bad practice to manage all environment -related activities in Jenkins as well? We did this sort of with Microsoft Team Foundation Server. We had automatic build/deploy/test activities, but we also managed our database and application deployment activites from TFS too. So if I needed to re-build a specific database, instead of running a manual script that deploys the database, I would just “right-click-and-run” the database deployment. Same thing with testing; if I needed to run a bunch of UI tests, I would just start the UI testing build activity.
However, I am unsure whether this is a good practice in Jenkins, and whether it would be a good idea anyway 🙂 To my understanding Jenkins can use Ant, so it would be very easy for us to execute individual Ant targets through Jenkins.
Jenkins is very manageable and an interesting tool too (based on my personal experience).
The best thing is its saves tons of TIME.
I, myself is using Jenkins with Ant, and I found out that Jenkins is making life easy :).
It will be a good practice to analyse your project needs and then your idea must be one click and every thing is done!
If you want this then Jenkins is best (with Ant).