5 Signs It's Time to Leave Jenkins

If your team is growing and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is starting to feel slow, fragile, or political, you’re not alone. Many teams accept build queues, brittle CI/CD pipelines, and constant coordination as “normal growing pains.” We did too.

When we started building BuildNinja, someone asked, “Why are you building another CI/CD tool? Isn’t Jenkins good enough?”

The honest answer wasn’t that Jenkins is bad — it’s that we’d spent two years living with problems we kept telling ourselves were normal.

“That’s just how CI/CD works at scale,” we’d say. One day, we realized: no, this isn’t normal. These are Jenkins problems, and there has to be a better way.

Here are the five signs that pushed us to build something different.

Key Takeaways

• Build queue opacity becomes a planning problem, not just an annoyance.

• Shared Jenkins setups create cross-team coordination and political friction.

• Pipeline setup complexity discourages automation and experimentation.

• When developers avoid the CI system, delivery slows, and bottlenecks form.

• CI/CD infrastructure should not be more fragile than production systems.

Sign 1: We Couldn't Explain Our Build Queue

One of our developers asked a simple question: “Why did my build wait 18 minutes when there were idle agents?”

Nobody had a good answer. We knew the builds were queued. We just didn’t know why they queued the way they did.

What we experienced:

• Same code pushed at the same time would start immediately sometimes, wait 20 minutes other times.

• No visibility into queue position or wait time estimates.

• Developers started pushing code earlier “just in case” the queue was slow.

• “When will my build run?” became an unanswerable question.

Why this hurts growing teams:

Queue opacity wasn’t just annoying — it was a planning problem. Developers couldn’t estimate when they’d get feedback. Teams batched changes to avoid queue time, which made debugging harder when things broke.

At 30 engineers, this was tolerable. At 70, with multiple teams deploying throughout the day, it became a coordination bottleneck no one could see, but everyone felt.

Sign 2: Three Teams, One Jenkins, Constant Negotiations

We started with one engineering team using Jenkins. When we added a second team, things got complicated. By the time we had three teams, someone’s job became “Jenkins traffic controller.”

The coordination overhead we lived with:

• Teams negotiating deploy windows: “Can you wait until after our release?”

• Discussions about “fair” build agent allocation.

• Ad-hoc policies about build priorities.

• One team’s aggressive caching strategy broke another team’s tests.

Why this becomes a coordination bottleneck:

We were spending engineering time coordinating access to CI/CD infrastructure. That’s backwards. The tool meant to enable autonomous shipping had become something that required cross-team meetings.

Jenkins wasn’t designed for multi-tenancy. No resource quotas, no team-level visibility, no isolated environments. We built workarounds, but every workaround was another thing to maintain and another source of confusion for new team members.

Sign 3: New Projects Meant Three Days of Jenkins Archaeology

We spun up a new microservice. Setting up CI/CD should have been routine. Instead, it turned into a three-day project of copy-pasting, debugging, and hoping.

Our setup experience:

• Found three existing pipelines to use as “templates” — all different.

• Copied the most recent one, discovered it needed plugins we didn’t have installed.

• Found references to shared libraries with zero documentation.

• Spent half a day debugging webhooks that wouldn’t trigger.

• Eventually got something working, but couldn’t explain why half of it was configured the way it was.

Why this slows experimentation:

Every new project starts with Jenkins archaeology. Fast project setup enables experimentation. When spinning up CI/CD takes three days, teams delay automation. We shipped manually, “just this once,” and quietly accumulated technical debt we’d pay for later.

Velocity isn’t just about shipping existing projects — it’s also about how quickly you can start new ones.

Sign 4: Our Developers Stopped Looking at Jenkins

We noticed a pattern: developers would push code, then wait for the email notification. When builds failed, they’d ping our DevOps lead before even checking the logs.

What this revealed about our setup:

• The Jenkins UI was complex enough that developers avoided it.

• Error messages required Jenkins knowledge, not just code knowledge.

• Troubleshooting meant understanding Jenkins internals.

• “Ask DevOps about the build failure” became the default response.

Why this creates hidden bottlenecks:

CI/CD should empower developers to ship independently. Instead, we’d created a system where developers avoided interacting with it. Every “can you check why this failed?” was a context switch for someone else — a bottleneck we’d inadvertently built.

When capable engineers can’t debug their own builds, the system is the problem, not the people.

Sign 5: Jenkins Became More Critical Than Production

Our Jenkins instance achieved a special status: it became infrastructure more critical than our actual product. When Jenkins went down, everything stopped.

How we knew this was backwards:

• Jenkins configuration changes required more scrutiny than product code.

• We maintained a backup Jenkins “just in case”.

• Teams planned work around scheduled Jenkins maintenance.

• We had runbooks for Jenkins incidents but not for most product issues.

Why this inverts your risk model:

CI/CD infrastructure should be less critical than the systems it deploys. If your delivery pipeline becomes the single point of failure everyone is afraid to touch, you’ve inverted your risk model.

At that point, the tool meant to make releases safer is actively slowing the business down.

If You’re Seeing These Signs

We wish we’d started tracking this earlier. If any of these five signs feel familiar, measure them for the next two weeks:

• Queue visibility: How often do developers ask, “When will my build run?”

• Coordination overhead: How much time goes into negotiating shared Jenkins resources and deploy windows?

• Setup friction: How long does it actually take to add CI/CD to a new project?

• Developer confidence: How often do engineers troubleshoot builds themselves versus asking for help?

• Operational burden: How risky do Jenkins changes feel, and how often are they delayed or over-reviewed?

This turns vague frustration into concrete signals — and makes it much easier to justify change when the numbers are in front of you.

What’s Actually Breaking at This Stage of Growth

Looking back, all five signs pointed to the same pattern: we were managing Jenkins instead of Jenkins managing our deployments.

These issues don’t usually appear when you’re a five-person startup. They emerge when:

• Multiple teams share the same CI/CD infrastructure.

• Deployment frequency increases.

• Compliance and reliability expectations rise.

• You don’t yet have a dedicated platform organization.

At that stage, flexibility becomes operational drag, and invisible complexity turns into daily friction.

Counterarguments and Trade-offs

To be fair, Jenkins is powerful and battle-tested. It can be the right choice when:

• You need extremely custom pipelines.

• You have a dedicated platform team maintaining it.

• You operate at a very large enterprise scale with specialized workflows.

But for teams in the 20–200 engineer range, that flexibility often becomes a liability. Instead of enabling teams, it requires constant care, coordination, and institutional knowledge to keep things running smoothly.

The problem isn’t that Jenkins can’t scale — it’s that scaling it demands effort that many mid-sized teams shouldn’t have to spend.

What Modern Teams Actually Need from CI/CD

After living through these problems, the principles became clear:

• Transparency by default: Teams should understand queue behavior and resource usage without asking around.

• Multi-team by design: Isolation and fairness shouldn’t require custom scripts or politics.

• Self-service friendly: Developers should be able to set up and debug builds without infrastructure expertise.

• Operational calm: Updating CI/CD should be routine, not a high-risk event.

Tools that meet these needs reduce friction quietly — which is exactly how infrastructure should behave.

What a Different CI/CD Approach Looks Like

Once we stepped back and questioned the assumptions we’d accepted, the direction became clear.

A CI/CD system that actually supports growing teams should offer:

• Predictable, visible build queues so developers know when feedback is coming.

• Built-in isolation between teams so one group’s work doesn’t block another’s.

• Consistent project setup patterns so new services don’t require copying and guessing.

• Developer-friendly debugging that points to code problems, not infrastructure internals.

• Routine, low-risk maintenance instead of fragile, high-stakes upgrades.

That shift — from maximum flexibility to operational simplicity — is what ultimately led us to build BuildNinja. Not because Jenkins was “bad,” but because the trade-offs no longer made sense for teams at this stage of growth.

Conclusion

Most teams don’t leave Jenkins because of one catastrophic failure. They leave because small, daily inefficiencies slowly turn into systemic delivery problems.

If your CI/CD requires constant coordination, expert intervention, and careful handling, it’s no longer supporting your growth — it’s shaping it.

Recognizing that shift early gives you the chance to fix the bottleneck before it becomes cultural and operational debt.

See the Difference in Practice

If these signs feel familiar, the fastest way to evaluate alternatives is to compare real workflows, not feature lists.

• 👉 Watch the 3-minute demo to see how predictable queues and team isolation work in practice.

• 👉 Try BuildNinja Solo Edition (free for up to 10 users) and run it alongside Jenkins.

• 👉 Read Jenkins Complexity: Why Jenkins Is Too Complex and How to Simplify It to understand where that complexity comes from and how modern teams are simplifying CI/CD.

You don’t have to migrate everything at once — but you do deserve CI/CD that scales with your team instead of slowing it down.