Improve LAVA UI and User Experience

Registered by Paul Larson

In order to bring the Validation Dashboard user experience one step forward the LAVA team will focus on a nice, comprehensive interface for the main use cases. Those were identified to be:

* Platform Image Testing (example questions provided above.)
* Kernel Continuous Integration ("Has Linus' kernel regressed on any of our boards over the last day?")
* An individual jobs' click-flow: making it easy to follow a job from entering the scheduler to the actual result submission.
* The validation.linaro.org frontpage, which should give an interesting overview of the most important tests being run.

During this session, we would like to review the existing pages in LAVA to discuss whether they are useful, or should be modified or eliminated, and look for information that is missing or difficult to get at, and discuss how to improve that.

Session notes:
A few issues in the current proposal with width, layout, etc should need just a few fixes before we can roll it out
Merge as-is, there is an issue with one of the reports we have on the front page being too wide, but that's really a bug in the report. Do we need the date? the date takes up a lot of space on there
ACTION: make sure we have a bug on that report - it needs to be fixed regardless of whether we choose to have it on the front page
Side bar - do we even need it? Some pages don't have enough information to warrant having a side bar - this can be dropped for those pages
current side bar used has some visual issues, but in general people agreed that having a collapsable side bar would be useful. Screen width on some small screens is really bad, so we can't assume we have a lot of horizontal space to work with
ACTION: Consider other sidebar widgets, ensure that other parts of the UI don't get hidden by the side bar
Flow of submitting a job to seeing results through the lifecycle
* having a "me" page
  - Should this be a global me page, or per app?
  - list of scheduler jobs that this user has scheduled
  - notification options - notify me by email or RSS feed for all my jobs?
  - ability to subscribe to subscribe to other events "actions on objects" would be subscribable from the context of the thing you want to be subscribed to
  - email notification could be jammed, could cause hangs if it doesn't timeout. We should put them in a message queue for the user, and those get processed by a job that runs frequently. We can mitigate with the RSS feed notification.
   -- I'm not sure this is totally needed, I think this could be set up so it doesn't have to block on the email. The mailer daemon should process the queue and we shouldn't have to care about it
Front page:
should load quickly - actual content is not easy to pick something that matters to everyone, so we could put just about anything here
This is also a marketing page for lava, for linaro
ACTION: Involve marketing in what should go here - get them to review what we do and make sure they agree
theme/branding
For lava as a project, we might want a generic lava logo rather than linaro branded (low prio)
Menus:
We need a top level menu that stats constant, apps can introduce 2nd level menus if needed
example: dashboard currently changes the menu
result view (/bundles/sha1)
On the view that shows a list of test runs in a bundle it currently shows:
test run - this links to the results and is fine
test name - this links to some kind of confusing list of historic runs
uploaded on - ok, some sense of time is good
analyzed on - this is confusing, some people have said that they think this means that someone triaged this test result and filed bugs on it, etc. that's not what it means at all
What we need here:
some kind of pass/fail/totals - we should be able to see this at a glance, then drill down for details
***If we can determine context, then could we show the current results across the top, and below show historical results in comparison as a sort of waterfall view
Could we build the context based on testing efforts?
ACTION: Kiko is working on a set of mockups in basalmics to recommend to us
- waterfall views
- time based reports
Should we have bundle streams?
Should we name them something else? As a matter of fact, we explain what's a bundle stream at each sessions.
Kernel waterfall is too busy, too many bricks
Kiko has an idea to arrange this by trees - instead of having checkboxes for trees, have links for each kernel tree
For boards where we can't run the test, we should have a red unsupported or broken block for the lava-test seciton

Blueprint information

Status:
Not started
Approver:
Paul Larson
Priority:
Undefined
Drafter:
None
Direction:
Needs approval
Assignee:
None
Definition:
Discussion
Series goal:
Accepted for trunk
Implementation:
Unknown
Milestone target:
milestone icon backlog

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