Comment by mikagrml

Your approach is valid. We're doing something similar (e.g. auto-building Debian packages on each commit/push) and use git's post-receive and svn's post-commit hook to detect the modified branch and then trigger a parameterized Jenkins build which takes the branch as argument. You can even trigger different kinds of builds/tests/... depending on the branch name. Due to the nature of branching inside Git it's much more fun with Git, but it basically works for subversion as well.