Development tooling whiz JetBrains has kicked off the early access program for version 2020.2 of its CI/CD server TeamCity, designed to be more user friendly and introduce OAuth support.

For now, OAuth authentication is only available for users of GitHub.com and Bitbucket Cloud, though the team is said to be working on getting GitLab and Azure DevOps on board as well. Once enabled, project members can use the credentials for those services to log in to TeamCity, with the intent of upping their collaborative game.

Starting with version 2020.2, projects using TeamCity as well as JetBrains’ integrated team environment, Space, can add an indicator of their build status to the latter. This is realised through a connection to TeamCity’s Commit Status Publisher, meaning status changes will be forwarded and updated in real-time. Users will have to spend some time configuring settings on both ends, but nothing too complicated from the looks of it and well worth the work for regular Space users.

With respect to the build status, TeamCity’s developers have now added an option to automatically mute previous failures of a test if retries are enabled and one of those has come out successfully. The feature is meant to exclude the influence of flaky tests on the build status and can be enabled through the ##teamcity[testRetrySupport enabled=’true’] service message.

To make sure parallel builds won’t have too much of an impact on memory consumption in complex projects, users will also have an option to limit the number of artifacts published per build in the new version. Another helpful feature in that context are execution timeouts, which come into play if part of a composite build hasn’t been able to start for some time and would have called for manual termination before.

TeamCity 2020.2 will also include ways to customise a system’s clean-up schedule through cron-like expressions, so that users can establish regular cleaning routines at times most convenient for their usage patterns.

The team has been busy moving its experimental UI forward. The alternative interface was first released in version 2019.1 and can be enabled under settings and tools. With TeamCity 2020.2, it gets a new header and should become easier to extend, as plugins can now be written using web technologies and the respective frameworks. More details on that are scheduled to follow in the next couple of weeks.