For Ant and Maven builds the following system properties will be added via -D command line:
When building projects, the build order is determined by the inter-dependency of the projects. This would mean that the dependencies of a project are built first.
In cases when a project group can build projects in parallel build queues but one of those projects depend on another project, the inter-dependent projects will build in the same build queue.
Projects can be built in two ways:
Projects will have the in queue icon once the forced build or a scheduled build is triggered. This means that the project is either in the prepare build queue or in the build queue.
Checkout or update of projects takes longer with distributed builds enabled because after an SCM checkout or SCM update, an SCM changelog follows to get the "latest update date" needed to determine whether projects should build or not.
If a build has been started, you can cancel it before it completes. See Cancelling Builds for more information.