Easier navigation of test results

jezz.santos's Avatar

jezz.santos

22 Jun, 2016 07:45 PM

Hi Feodor,

I have been meaning to write you this suggestion for months. Every day it gives us plenty of pain that we have learned to grin and bear. But I was hoping to see if we could ease that pain somehow.

The Problem:
We have many jobs running in parrallel. On any given build, we are likely to have several tests that fail. (Because we can't afford to run all these tests on a developer desktop - that would take about 5-6hrs of waiting).
Finding out how many tests in each job have failed, and seeing them displayed for each job is a real PITA for us to continuously, manually, navigate the various UI elements of the tool.

The Ask:
We would love it if the UI provided us links to ease the navigation effort, so we can get the vital information we need from a broken build,

Issue:
From the build page at https://CI.appveyor.com/projects, it takes 1 click to get to the overview page of the build, where the jobs are listed. (See images for a typical build overview for us containing several jobs and unknown number of failing tests in some of them).

For each failed job, we now need to click (CTRL+click to open the job in another tab). It opens in console view, which can take up to about 5secs for us. We have to wait to see the 'TESTS' tab. Then we click the 'TESTS' tab to see what actually failed. For us that takes another 10 seconds. Thankfully the failed tests are at the top of the list, which is a big relief.

Now, whilst this may not sound like much of an effort (now that I have described it here), we have to repeat this process for every job that fails. Sometimes as much as 10 jobs every build. It not only a lot of clicking, but a lot of waiting for browser pages to load. And we are doing this multiple times a day - each build. Sometimes we just want to know how many tests have failed overall. Sometimes we want to just see all the failed tests (not the console output or green tests). Ultimately, we just want to know what the name of the failed test was, so that we can run them locally and start fixing them. So setting up multiple tabs, navigating each one to the right page, and flicking through them all is a lot of pain for us every few hours.

A Solution:
Can we suggest a simple UI change to the build overview page that would make life a so much better for us and others?

On the build overview page (like the one in the attachment), would it be possible to show how many broken tests there are for each job (if it has tests, and any of them fail), with a hyperlink placed to the right of the job name, and to the left of the duration of the job? The link would be a number in red that when clicked navigates straight to the 'TESTS' tab of each job.

That would be a massive improvement in navigation, and provide us one of the key pieces of info we need at a glance of the build page.

The next improvement could be, a total of the total number of broken tests for the whole build (if has multiple jobs). This would be a bonus. But not necessary, initially.

Ultimately, a single page for all jobs that shows only broken tests would be the ultimate convenience, and a real bonus, but we are not anticipating that.

Is any of this possible?

  1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Feodor Fitsner on 23 Jun, 2016 12:00 AM

    Feodor Fitsner's Avatar

    Hi Jezz,

    Thanks for your feedback!

    We are going to add the first item (the number of success/failed tests on Jobs page) from your solution later this week and deploy update. Will let you know when it's available.

  2. 2 Posted by jezz.santos on 23 Jun, 2016 04:31 AM

    jezz.santos's Avatar

    Thats great Feodor! Thanks. You guys rock.

  3. Support Staff 3 Posted by Feodor Fitsner on 27 Jun, 2016 03:37 AM

    Feodor Fitsner's Avatar

    Hi Jezz,

    It's been deployed - see attached screenshot.

    Let me know how it worked.

  4. 4 Posted by jezz.santos on 27 Jun, 2016 03:51 AM

    jezz.santos's Avatar

    Oh, this is lovely!
    Thanks Feodor!

  5. Support Staff 5 Posted by Feodor Fitsner on 27 Jun, 2016 03:52 AM

    Feodor Fitsner's Avatar

    Nice! :)

  6. jezz.santos closed this discussion on 27 Jun, 2016 03:55 AM.

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