Background: We have a number of Jenkins top-level jobs that uses (and shares) other jobs as sort-of subroutines. To control the overall flow we use the Jenkins Parameterized Trigger Plugin. The top-level jobs then gather test reports, build reports etc. from the sub-builds and conveniently publishes them in one go. It's working really well.

Problem at hand: Each of the top-level jobs are started with a number of parameters, and only a selection of these are passed on to the sub-jobs. For some sub-jobs, the parameters are the same as they were some time ago, when the sub-job was last called from this top-level job, but our top-level script isn't aware of this. In essence, we waste build time, building the sub-job again with the same parameters.

In a perfect world the Parameterized Trigger Plugin. would have an option like 

• Do not rebuild job if identical parameters (and configuration unchanged).

which would perform the following steps:

1. Compare the build-parameters of all kept builds of the given job, to the current parameters.
2. If the job-configuration is unchanged since the found job was build, setup environmental variable to point to the old job that was found above.
3. If job not found or the job-configuration has been changed since the found job was build, perform the build as usual.