The notion of build promotion is a mechanism that lets you differenciate good builds from bad builds. It is also often used for throttling changes that the downstream sees — for example, let's say your builds are going through QA and performance testing, each of which takes 3 hours to run. If you let them pick up the last successful build while your project is producing a new build every 15 mins, then chances are those two downstream efforts will pick up different versions of your build. This problem is particularly evident when downstream efforts involve human activities. They can get overwhelmed if you are building too frequently. By promoting builds selectively, you can make sure the downstream efforts are concentrated on smaller number of builds.
Build promotion process configuration consists of three things: