How can I make artifacts available to the QA team with a user-friendly UI?

Question

Currently developers push to master, jenkins picks that up, builds it, and then I go to artifacts, download the APK files and upload them in a Microsoft teams group so that the QA team can download either the latest or any previous version I had uploaded before.

I want to change this process to make it more efficient. I want something with a UI that the QA team can go to and download whichever version of the app (APK files) they want.

I want it all to be automated, so as soon as I push the master, Jenkins will build and the files will eventually show in this portal, webpage or section of Jenkins and the QA team can download which ever version they want. How can I achieve this? Is there a Jenkins plugin for this?

Answer 1

It seems to me that you're looking for an artifact store such as Nexus or Artifactory.

Both solutions have Jenkins plugins which will simplify the process of uploading your artifacts to them.

You can find an example as to how to upload artifacts from your Jenkins pipeline to Nexus in this link and an example for Artifactory in this link.

Both solutions are very common and relatively easy to manage and use and are known by the community for a long time so you can find many tutorials that explain how they can be used and benefit you.

Then, you just need to allow your QA team read access to the relevant artifacts repo and they can download whatever version of the artifacts they need.

Answer 2

The answer @itai-ganot provides is the "best approach".

A "simpler" alternative is to leverage Jenkins "Archive Artifacts" option ; example here and provide your QA people Read access to Jenkins instance. Intro to Access Control

Be aware you should implement strategy to manage the builds and artifacts or you'll quickly run out of space (or accumulate garbage).

You can also copy those artifacts to another job workspace or elsewhere.