How can I add a manual stage to a build queue?

[Bernie Schelberg]

We have a deployment job in a build plan which is configured as a manual stage. Our problem is that usually more changes are committed to the source code repository before the latest build has finished, so there's nearly always a compilation or automated tests running. Thus, when we click the button to execute the manual stage and deploy, we get the error "Build requested but not started, you have reached the maximum number of concurrent builds allowed.".

I see the Administration option to allow concurrent builds, and this may help us in some situations, but that's really dependant on how many agents we can configure to run concurrent builds, and hope that we can stay ahead of the commits somehow.

Ideally, we'd like to be able to "queue" the deploy stage, but that doesn't seem to be possible. Or have I missed an option somewhere?

[Przemek Bruski]

If you enable/bump up concurrent build setting, the build will be queued if there are no agents available. Try it, I think it will do what you want. You can also enable that per plan.

[Bernie Schelberg]

I enabled concurrent builds and allowed two concurrent builds. So now I have two Compile / Test stages running and I still can't run my deploy stage. Are you suggesting I just keep increasing the allowed number of concurrent builds? We have 5 agents on this server, and we share it with other teams. I don't think we would be very popular if we clogged up all the agents with concurrent builds of our project, just so that we have enough bandwidth to manually start a deploy stage.

This is not a solution.

[James Dumay]

Bernie, would something like this feature request help you in your situation?

[Bernie Schelberg]

Sort of. We can already do that by setting Server Capabilities and Plan Requirements. But then we lose the advantage of being able to run the build on whatever agent is available. It's a band-aid on top of a band-aid on top of a problem.

Should I create a new Feature Request, because from what you're saying what I want to do isn't possible, and it's not that I've missed an option somewhere..?

[James Dumay]

If it doesn't work for you please feel free to create a feature request :)