I developed a tool which might make dealing with build logs easier and I would like to hear what you think!

[Noah]

Hi devops community!

My name is Noah and I am currently writing my bachelor's thesis in business informatics.

My thesis is about more efficient failure cause identification by comparing two build logs.

One of the questions I want to answer in my thesis is if a specialized differencing tool supports a developer reading a build log and also if it possibly helps to find the failure cause faster.

To validate these claims, I built a tool that integrates itself as a google chrome extension into the web interface of Travis-CI.org.

The idea behind the tool is the following: When a build fails, one might derive the cause of the failure by comparing the currently failing build log with a previously successful one. The problem is, that build logs contain a lot of irrelevant data (e.g. download speeds, timestamps) that would make a traditional comparison of build logs useless. The tool I built filters for such disturbances and displays a difference between the two logs and further provides you with some useful features, to faster find the failure cause.

Now to validate the usefulness (if any) of my tool, I am relying on the experienced devops community to give me feedback.

I would like to know if you think such a tool could support you in your daily workflow or if you think this is not useful at all.

As the scope of a bachelor thesis is not big enough to support every build tool and programming language in existence, I opted for Java and Maven using Travis CI as CI solution.

Please feel free to try it out, even if you do not have a project on Travis CI available. There is a demo available on https://web.blogdiff.net/instructions#demo

If you could be a real saint, you would also participate in my very short (takes around 3min) survey (https://web.blogdiff.net/survey?source=7), but you can also just participate by replying to this thread.

Thank you!