The DevOps world has transitioned from developer tools that are purely functional, to developer tools being part of a "developer experience." It was no longer about a single tool, but the many tools developers use throughout the day, and how they work together to achieve a better workflow for the developer.

Developer tool companies like Heroku, Atlassian, and GitHub have raised the bar for what is considered a good developer experience. Gradually, developers have become more attracted to tools that are not only functional, but are designed to fit into their existing workflow seamlessly. This shift represents a higher standard for design and function, where developers are expecting an exceptional user experience. Jenkins needed to rise to meet this higher standard.

Creating and visualising continuous delivery Pipelines has always been something valuable for many Jenkins users. This has been demonstrated in the plugins that the Jenkins community has created to meet their needs. This also indicates a need to revisit how Jenkins currently expresses these concepts, and consider delivery pipelines as a central theme to the Jenkins user experience.

It is not just continuous delivery concepts, but the tools that developers use every day such as GitHub, Bitbucket, Slack, Puppet, or Docker. It is about more than Jenkins, as it includes the developer workflow surrounding Jenkins, which comprised multiple tools.

New teams can encounter challenges when learning how to assemble their own Jenkins experience. However, the goal to improve their time to market by shipping better software more consistently is the same. Assembling the ideal Jenkins experience is something we, as a community of Jenkins users and contributors, can work together to define. As time progresses, developers' expectations of a good user experience change, and the Jenkins project needs to be receptive to these expectations.

The Jenkins community has worked constantly to build the most technically capable and extensible software automation tool in existence. Not revolutionizing the Jenkins developer experience today could mean that a closed source option attempts to capitalize on this in the future.

Blue Ocean was created to meet such demands of its time. However, as time passed, more modern tools have cropped up to replace it. Now, the time has come for the rise of other plugins of similar functionality. Therefore, any new development or enhancement of Blue Ocean has ceased. If you are interested in contributing to a plugin which serves a similar purpose, you should consider the alternative options as suggested in What is Blue Ocean? section on above.