Currently Jenkins does not allow setting default values for job configuration (retention, authorization, etc) From administrative point of view lack of centralized management makes managing jobs extremely hard. Instead of centralized management, retention and authorization strategies are defined at job level. Currently management of hundreds jobs requires error-prone groovy scripts.

My suggestion is to introduce option to use profile based defaults for jobs. In an ideal world profiles would be stored in a version control system and updates to profiles would be propagated to jobs using them without running the actual job.

 

Example profile:

{   authorizationMatrix(...)   buildDiscarder(logRotator(artifactNumToKeepStr: '1', daysToKeepStr: 30)), pipelineTriggers([cron('H/15 * * * *')])]) }