## Frequently Asked Questions 

## Why does Blue Ocean exist? 

The world has moved on from developer tools that are purely functional to developer tools being part of a "developer experience". That is to say, it’s no longer about a single tool but the many tools developers use throughout the day and how they work together to achieve a workflow that’s beneficial for the developer - this is Developer Experience. 

Developer tools companies like Heroku, Atlassian and Github have raised the bar for what is considered good developer experience, and developers are increasingly expecting exceptional design. In recent years developers are becoming more rapidly attracted to tools that are not only functional but are designed to fit into their workflow seamlessly and are a joy to use. This shift represents a higher standard of design and user experience that Jenkins needs to rise to meet. 

Creating and visualising continuous delivery pipelines is something valuable for many Jenkins users and this is demonstrated in the 5+ plugins that the community has created to meet their needs. To us this 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’s not just continuous delivery concepts but the tools that developers use every day – Github, Bitbucket, Slack, HipChat, Puppet or Docker. It’s about more than Jenkins – it’s the developer workflow that surrounds Jenkins that spans multiple tools. 

New teams have little time for learning to assemble their own Jenkins experience – they want to improve their time to market by shipping better software faster. Assembling that ideal Jenkins experience is something we can work together as a community of Jenkins users and contributors to define. As time progresses, developers' expectations of good user experience will change and the mission of Blue Ocean will enable the Jenkins project to respond. 

The Jenkins community has poured its sweat and tears into building the most technically capable and extensible software automation tool in existence. Not doing anything to revolutionize the Jenkins developer experience today is just inviting someone else – in closed source – to do it. 

## Where is the name from? 

The name Blue Ocean comes from the book Blue Ocean Strategy where instead of looking at strategic problems within a contested space you look at problems in the larger uncontested space. 

To put this more simply, consider this quote from ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky: "skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been". 

## Does Blue Ocean support Freestyle jobs? 

Blue Ocean aims to deliver a great experience around Pipeline and be compatible with any Freestyle jobs that you have configured in your system. However, they won’t be able to benefit from any of the features built for Pipelines – for example, Pipeline visualization. 

As Blue Ocean is designed to be extensible it will be possible for the community to extend it for 

