Stage stuck with status "Job has not yet been queued. Waiting for prior stages to complete." for no evident reason.

David R Cattley

I have a plan that blocks a stage with status "Job has not yet been queued.  Waiting for prior stages to complete." and yet the prior stages report status completed and at least 9 agents are available that can build the stage currently waiting.

This also affects a clone of the plan.

How can one go about troubleshooting what the issue is and resolving it?

David R Cattley

I did check that before posting and, yes, multiple agents were online and able to run the job.

I subsequently discovered the issue:

The Job contained a disabled Task of type Artifact Download.  The Artifact Download task had been created with a reference to a Plan that had subsequently been deleted from the system.  Even though the Task was disabled, the system evidently blocked the Job from being scheduled because the referenced Artifacts were not available.  After removing (deleting) the Task from the Job, the system now schedules the Job.

There are a few things that could have made this easier to understand:

1. If the Task is disabled, it need not play a role in job scheduling.
2. There was no indication in the error message that the Job was being held due to unsatisfied Artifact dependency.  The presented message was completely misleading as it mentions prior stages instead of Artifacts (from another Plan).
3. There was no indication in the Task as displayed in the Job that the parameterization of the Task (which Plan and Artifacts were specified) were no longer valid.
4. While I cannot be sure I suspect that there was no warning (or notice) at the time the original source Plan of the Artifacts was deleted thus leaving the dangling reference in the consuming Job/Plan. 

In any event, I have figured it out and I appreciate your response.

Regards.

-Dave