Testing is important. To that end a developer should implement unit tests to assure any implemented code does what it is meant to do, and also integration tests with networking mocks to, for example, make sure endpoints do what they’re supposed to do. Then there are end-to-end tests to assure that the code works properly in tandem with other players.

It’s good to set end-to-end tests suites to run continuously according to a schedule to capture errors that managed to sneak it. It’s also good to trigger those end-to-end tests explicitly when you know that you’ve added risky code and would like the extra check.

Similarly to how I’ve implemented skipping builds in declarative pipelines, I have implemented the same concept here as well:

post {
    // Run end-to-end tests, if requested
    success {
        script {
            if (BRANCH_NAME == "develop") {
                result = sh (script: "git log -1 | grep '.*\\[e2e\\].*'", 
returnStatus: true)
                if (result == 0) {
                    build job: '****/master', wait: false
                }
            }
        }
    }
    ...
}

Once a job for a micro-service has finished its run successfully, I am checking if the git commit log contains the keyword “[e2e]”. If yes, this triggers a run of a job that does the end-to-end testing. Note that this is a multi-branch job and so need to specify both the job name and the branch name.