visual cues

The Tinderbox waterfall page is pretty detail-heavy. I see a lot of complaints specifically that the page gets too wide, making it hard to see at a glance if anything is failing to compile or failing a test (which for Mozilla means that you can't check in until it's fixed).

One way to make this better is to collapse the information and provide visual cues:

visual cues

visual cues

Ok, well maybe not that exact picture :) But the point is that all Linux, Windows and Mac machines are represented by one column per build-type, not one column per machine.

Another useful thing to do would be to make use cases, and provide different front-ends instead of just the waterfall page. For example, there's the "can I check in right now" use case, which is different than the "are all machines reporting ok" and "what do the performance numbers look like today" use cases.

Right now, we have the graph server, and to track down e.g. a perf regression window can be pretty painful (mostly because you can't see checkins along the graph; this is probably most appropriate for the new graph server).

For the "can I check in now" use case, making the front page of Tinderbox more friendly would be a good first step.

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