Builds are tagged unstable even when they are successful

Question

I am running Jenkins version 1.411 and use Maven for building.

Even though the application builds successfully, Jenkins treats it as an unstable build. I have disabled all tests to isolate the problem.

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 45.389s
[INFO] Finished at: Wed May 11 12:16:57 EST 2011
[INFO] [DocLinks] Skip document Adaptiv generated site ... (No such directory: site)
Final Memory: 27M/543M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
channel stopped
Archiving artifacts
Email was triggered for: Unstable
Sending email for trigger: Unstable
An attempt to send an e-mail to empty list of recipients, ignored.
Finished: SUCCESS

Solution

It's some time ago that I used hudson/jenkins but you should have a look at the Jenkins Glossary

Unstable build: A build is unstable if it was built successfully and one or more publishers report it unstable. For example if the JUnit publisher is configured and a test fails then the build will be marked unstable.

Publisher: A publisher is part of the build process other than compilation, for example JUnit test runs. A publisher may report stable or unstable result depending on the result of its processing. For example, if a JUnit test fails, then the whole JUnit publisher may report unstable.

So I suppose you have some other build parts (apart from JUnit) that report an unstable result. Have a look at the whole build process log.