Hello from the new UX Designer

[Veena Sonwalkar]

Hi Go Users,

I am a User Experience Designer and excited to be part of the Go team. I am here to collect your feedback on the product, ensure you have a good experience using Go and your needs are being addressed. 

I would love to hear back from you on the usability of Go, discuss missing functionalities and general improvements to Go. Please ping me back if you would like to participate in feedback sessions over phone. 

Thanks.

Veena Sonwalkar

[Moritz Lenz]

Hi,

generally, I like the UI.

My main UI complaints are:
 * In the admin section where one edits pipelines, one has to click quite often to get to the task definitions. Maybe a tree view with stages, jobs and tasks expanded could help
 * In the pipeline overview page, the destination of the various links are a bit confusing. The pipeline name links to the "Pipeline Activity" page, the build label to the "Value Stream Map", and the stage to "Stage Details" page. For somebody new, this is not obvious at all and quite confusing.

As for usability / missing features: I find that it's too hard to transport meta data where it needs to go.

Use case: in Pipeline 1 I build some piece of software, and record the version. In PIpeline 2 I deploy it to a test environment, test it in Pipelin 3, and in Pipeline 4 I I want to deploy this exact version to production.

How to get the version number from Pipeline 1 to Pipeline 4?
The currently accepted workaround seems to be record an artifact which contains the version number, and then in Pipeline 4 one has to fetch that artifact (specifying the complete path through all 3 previous pipelines), parse the version number out of it again, and insert it back into some command.
It would be much easier if one could extract the version number from within gocd (for example via regex against the console output of the build), and make that available as a property in all the related pipelines, and then simply use #{extracted-version} in the task definition.

Best regards,
Moritz

[Jason D]

Welcome!

 

There are quite a few enhancement requests concerning the UI already, so I won't repeat any of that here.  The biggest issue in the UX domain we have right now is performance when saving.  Less of a look and feel issue but still part of the UX.  With 2.5k pipelines, this is a big issue for us and very slow.  Thus far there has been no significant work to speed it up.  Our developers do not want to use the UI because of this, unless they have to. 

 

Your help is appreciated.  Thanks.

[Fredrik Wendt]

Hi,

When experimenting and setting up new pipelines not sure yet how all tasks need to look like or operate, I (and colleagues) find it's a COMPLETE mess where you have to jump back and forth between the "edit pipeline" under admin, "schedule pipeline" from frontpage, and then click your way down into the console output of a run pipe > stage > job > task. You essentially need to have _at least_ two tabs open:

* one for the admin / editing of tasks etc

* one for force-triggering/scheduling re-running of a task that you've edited

That's one huge mess that could really get some improvement!

And BTW, at each force-triggering, you're typically hit by a 5-10 second delay before an agent is assigned, and then picks up the job, and then starts to actually execute it, due to the agent-server communication is pull based instead of push. That sucks too, to be honest, and doesn't affect only when you're editing/playing around with pipelines, but in every scheduled run of any pipeline.

/ Fredrik

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[Fredrik Wendt]

(And just to be clear, that annoying delay has been reported here: https://github.com/gocd/gocd/issues/1125 )

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[Veena Sonwalkar]

Thanks Moritz, Jason and Fredrik for your responses. We will discuss the issues mentioned here and work on these soon. We are looking at the issues on Github as well and have been posting responses there directly.

You will be hearing from me going forward to help me better understand your work process and for feedback on workflows, wireframes, etc.     

[Arun Kumar R]

Hi,

One more thing I always felt annoying is If you want to add a task to be top in your Job, we add it at the end and move it all the way to the top one by one using the up arrow (also It does a multiple saves to the config xml). For this case I always go about editing the config file instead, which is not easy. Maybe a drag drop of tasks there would be helpful.

- Arun

Arunkumar RApplication Developer

Email

aru...@thoughtworks.com

Telephone

+65 94465314

[Ashwanth Kumar]

+1 to drag and drop of tasks within a stage.

Ashwanth Kumar / ashwanthkumar.in

[Sriram Narayanan]

Looping in Ashwath's response. For some reason, it got marked as spam.

[Veena Sonwalkar]

Thanks Arun & Ashwanth for your inputs, and Sriram for ensuring the conversation is not lost.

On Wednesday, July 8, 2015 at 11:33:40 AM UTC+5:30, Sriram Narayanan wrote:

Looping in Ashwath's response. For some reason, it got marked as spam.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Ashwanth Kumar <ashwan...@googlemail.com> wrote:

+1 to drag and drop of tasks within a stage.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 11:19 AM, Arun Kumar R <aru...@thoughtworks.com> wrote:

Hi,

One more thing I always felt annoying is If you want to add a task to be top in your Job, we add it at the end and move it all the way to the top one by one using the up arrow (also It does a multiple saves to the config xml). For this case I always go about editing the config file instead, which is not easy. Maybe a drag drop of tasks there would be helpful.

- Arun

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Arunkumar RApplication Developer

Email

aru...@thoughtworks.com

Telephone

+65 94465314

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Ashwanth Kumar / ashwanthkumar.in

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[Jason D]

off the top of my head (there are issues already submitted for this, i believe):

- ability to change the name of a pipeline without losing the history and narfing everything up

- refinement in permissions - ability to allow users to edit and change everything *except* trigger a pipeline in a certain environment (e.g. think "separation of duties" here for financial institutions/SOX, ...)

- ability to change names of parameters, env variables, etc in one place and have it reflected througout the pipeline.  Currently, it is easiest to do this directly in the config if there is a dependency.

- system wide environment variables.  currently, they are tied to an environment

- ability to make templates out of stages, jobs instead of just pipelines

- ability to setup alerts on "admin" type concerns - e.g. when the status of an agent changes, agent adds, when a pipeline is added, when a user is added/dropped

- slim down the UI - similar to what someone already did with the stylish plugin for GO in Chrome

 

On Tuesday, July 7, 2015 at 12:31:05 AM UTC-5, Veena Sonwalkar wrote:

[Arun Kumar R]

+1 for -  ability to change the name of a pipeline without losing the history. Everytime I end-up cloning the pipeline to name something more meaningful and end up keeping the old pipeline too just for history.

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[Aravind SV]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 1:22 AM, Veena Sonwalkar <veenaso...@thoughtworks.com> wrote:

Thanks Moritz, Jason and Fredrik for your responses. We will discuss the issues mentioned here and work on these soon.

I am all for discussions and ideas. However, as a core group, we work on the most critical usability issues or improvements first. We truly believe in open source, a culture of collaborative creation and welcome your code contributions as well.

This is not to say that the discussion is not important. By making your voice heard, at least by speaking out, it'll spur thinking about improving those areas. However, please know that it will not magically get fixed (soon), because there is a lot to do and being done, not because of lack of interest. As and when possible, we will pick from these suggestions, discuss them with you and everyone, and maybe work on them - or help someone else work on them.

Cheers,

Aravind

PS: I hear you about config save performance. Some of the work being done by Tomasz might help, by allowing you to move configuration out into different repositories.

[Björn Andersson]

The pipeline simple history page, when using Git at least, always shows the date of the commit instead of the time of the run. This makes it really hard determine when a run was done since you've to click in and look at some stage for the exact time.

I see this a lot because we've ended up using Go as a distributed cron, and we needed some material to create the pipeline so an empty Git repository ended up serving in those cases.

A quick 1000 word summation:

A fairly small thing, but it would make my life easier. :)

Cheers,

Björn

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"Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology
 because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense
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      Elegance and the Heart of Technology

[Veena Sonwalkar]

Thanks Bjorn for your feedback. 

[Carl Reid]

I would love to see a better customisable and dynamic dashboard that you can use on a big-screen to show the status of GO Builds that you are currently working on.

Possibly including a way to highlight failing builds very quickly in a zoomed in screen.

There are some third party implementations, one in particular that we use can be found here however  they are fidly to setup and hard to maintain especially considering they are separate from the main application.

A few minor improvements (these are also in GitHub issues however I thought them worth highlighting again)

1. Have a view on the schedule to see what jobs are currently waiting and what environments/resources they need. This can be useful when working out why a pipeline is not starting.
2. Table of contents style list for environments. Currently it is very hard to find the environments and edit the pipelines and agents within them or even just to list which environments you have.
3. Have a link to the admin view of the pipeline in more places. The "admin cog" should exist everywhere there is a pipeline box, including on the value stream view.
4. Add a search box to the pipeline customisation. If you are working on one pipeline and you want to clean up your view to show only that pipeline you have to go to personalize, remove all the other pipelines then scroll endlessly to find the pipeline you want and check it. This is tricky when you have a lot of pipelines.
5. Put a button next to the "search for a pipeline" option. I am forever clicking on personalize when actually i just want to search. Yes I know you can just press Enter however having a search button is just such a natural thing that I often just click the button next to the box which of course doesn't work!

Thanks

Carl

[Carl Reid]

One more thing I forgot, being able to order the pipelines, environments, pipeline groups etc. You can influence the order from the XML but that is hardly intuitive or user friendly.

A drag and drop view that performs ordering would be great. Even if this is just a personal view of the pipelines rather than changing the order in the XML file. This might be easier to achieve rather than modifying the xml file which could be problematic and would require admin privileges.

Thanks

carl

[Ming Xie]

A better view for console outputs would be helpful too...

Right now there is no easy way to identify which job failed within a stage because Go keeps all jobs' output into the same console. This makes investigations more difficult when we have long console output from each job.

-Ming

[Richard lee]

Hi there,

I have a couple of suggestions:

• I'd like the ability to easily re-arrange pipelines within a pipeline group. Yes you can do it from the xml, but at least admins should be able to easily arrange the pipelines in a fashion that makes sense to them.
  
• The ability to disable a specific task within a job, or a stage within a pipeline. At times, we need to temporarily disable a stage for example a set of tests that we don't want to run. We can copy the specific xml object, remove it, and replace it back, but again end users have to be comfortable with editing the xml
• +1 on the drag and drop within a stage, or task
• +1 on the ability to change a pipeline name without losing the history is a big one
• Can there also be an ability to see from the UI what a specific user changed within the config.xml? We see the whole xml changes, but from the local git repo /var/lib/go-server/db/config.git we can get the username and changes from a git log -p. Is it possible to narrow down the pipeline changes view, so when people are investigating pipeline changes they don't have to go through the whole pipeline.

Thanks!

[Veena Tammanna Sonwalkar]

Thanks Carl, Ming and Richard for your feedback. 

Richard, Carl,

Just to understand correctly, regarding the point on order of pipelines, both of you are referring to only the admin being able change the order of the pipelines. Is my assumption right?

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Veena SonwalkarExperience Design

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[Carl Reid]

No one can change the order of the pipelines using the user interface. Only admins can change it by editing the xml directly.

 

I think the order that the pipelines which is defined in the xml and the display order should be separate things.

 

Ideally the admin should be able to globally specify the display order of the pipelines (which is currently not possible unless you edit the xml) and each person should be able to customise the order of the pipelines to their preference, just as they can choose the pipelines to show, these settings should override the display order that the admin has specified.

 

Thanks

 

Carl

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[Veena Tammanna Sonwalkar]

Thanks Carl for clarifying. We understand that today one cannot change the order of pipelines on the UI. I am noting down that the interaction for changing the order (both for admin and user) should be simple in future.

[Darren Rowley]

Sorry very belated response but here's some feedback, more from go users rather than admins:

1. Nearly everywhere you can click on the green bar of each stage to drill in, except for in the pipeline/history list where you have to click the "i" icon?
2. Would be nice to have "run" button on the main VSM for pipelines that can be manually triggered.
3. No easy way (single click) way to run a pipeline after you have made config changes to it
4. No single view where you can get (all on one page) a list builds for a pipeline, with a list of commits each with a list filsets changed with a click through to a list of diffs for each file. Every CI tool has this except Go.   The closest you can get in Go is to drill into the compare and get to that "browse the timeline" view but then you still have to click on every build# and there are no diffs.
5. On the above "browse the timeline" vie wyou can select this pipeline but only into the compare view - would be nice of you could click into the VSM.
6. Would be nice if it was (optional per pipeline configuration) to hide instances of pipelines on the VSM if they haven't run. In this "infrastructre on demand" world a build might be deployed to many ad-hoc environments but we don't want them all on the VSM unless they were used.
7. On the VSM it would be nice to have a "next", "prev" icon inside each pipeline so you can walk backwards and forwards on the VSM to diagnose history.
8. The "Personalize" dropdown is good especially if you have many pipelines and groups. However there no way to revert it to "all" and then get your personalized settings back. You basically have to re-create personalized every time.
9. Search for pipelines is really fast which is great, however it doesn't collapse empty pipeline groups so you still have to scroll down through many groups that are all empty to maybe find your one searched pipeline at the bottom.

Cheers,

D.

[Darren Rowley]

Hey Veena,

Any update on the progress of any of the items mentioned in this thread?

Thanks,

D.

On Tuesday, July 7, 2015 at 5:31:05 PM UTC+12, Veena Sonwalkar wrote:

[Naveen Bhaskar]

Hello Darren, 

Veena is not in the team and I am in charge now. :-)

I will have a look at this and get back to you.

thanks

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Thanks and regards

Naveen Bhaskar 

Experience Design | User Interface Development

​Bangalore

Hangout & Skype : naveenbhaskar.77 

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[Marcin Kubica]

Hi

On GoCD bandwagon recently :)

Happy to see this answer Naveen.

Would be really great if we can agree some place where we can submit UI improvement ideas :) I already have few but not want to muddy this thread ;)

Github? 

Marcin

[Ketan Padegaonkar]

On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 8:34 PM Marcin Kubica <martin...@gmail.com> wrote:

Would be really great if we can agree some place where we can submit UI improvement ideas :) I already have few but not want to muddy this thread ;)

Github? 

Yes — that's the place to submit issues, but feel free to post the issue link to this group if you'd like to solicit additional feedback.