TravisBuddy: Adds comments to failed pull requests, tells author what went wrong | Hacker News Reader

TravisBuddy: Adds comments to failed pull requests, tells author what went wrong

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39 pointsbluzi28 comments

This will get messy quickly if you have a PR that you are adding commits to and have a failure for each commit. This has the same problem as some code coverage solutions, they are spamming the PR with comments that are only important for a few moments, then they are just noise...

Speaking about finding test failures quickly though, Jenkins and many others (except ALL the cloud/SaaS solutions?) actually parse test results via junit or similar to show you failures easily. I'm wondering why more SaaS don't do this?

See an example here (for our js-ipfs project): https://ci.ipfs.team/blue/organizations/jenkins/IPFS%2Fjs-ip...

It's so much easier to find test failures now and doesn't involve leaving a comment on the PR. It's simply two clicks to find this view from a PR (click the status message, click on "tests")

disclaimer: Developer Evangelist at CircleCI

re: parsing test results

CircleCI has been doing this for years. Not only does CircleCI read and store JUnit formatted test metadata but provides a dashboard called "Insights" to show this data overtime.

A Doc on collecting this data can be found here: https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/collect-test-data/

re: Code coverage spam

Thank you! I've often felt this way but never seen anyone else mention this. For many code coverage tools, you can integrate them at the GitHub point, which then gives you that "code coverage spam" or you can integrate it with a CI provider. This can simply fail a build if coverage drops. You can always have a status badge that shows coverage % in the readme as well.

Thanks for the feedback, we're working on methods to prevent TravisBuddy from commenting if the PR is being rapidly updated or if its comments are not relevant for some reason. One idea is that if the PR has a special label TravisBuddy won't comment on it. Another one is to be able to communicate with TravisBuddy using comments, so when you're sick of it you could just comment: "@TravisBuddy stop", and it'll stop immediately. (Maybe even "@TravisBuddy clear" to remove the previous comments)

Yeah, Jenkins' tests view was one of the inspirations for TravisBuddy :)

You can do what codecov does; They keep updating the same comment with the latest result.

That's an awesome idea, will be a feature for sure.

> This will get messy quickly if you have a PR that you are adding commits to and have a failure for each commit. This has the same problem as some code coverage solutions, they are spamming the PR with comments that are only important for a few moments, then they are just noise...

IIRC at least Codecov (https://codecov.io) has logic to go in and update the existing comment rather than spamming with new ones. It's nice!

CircleCI will parse and collect JUnit test metadata. https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/collect-test-data/

Idea is great but this logo looks like evil douchebag kind of guy with this tagline "Not the bot you deserve, but the one you need" doesn't look great. You definitely need to work on your brand. :)

Came here to comment exactly this. The expression on the face is expressing all the wrong messages about the service.

It also seems to be the avatar for the account that leaves the automated comments on the pull requests. I suspect it can cause a subliminal "this is a jerk" response in the author of the pull request who you'd probably prefer to feel receptive to this feedback.

Reminds me of vault boy[1] from Fallout but with a sneaky hat on.

https://www.google.com/search?q=vault+boy&tbm=isch

Yeah, but Vault Boy looks cheerful, this guy looks angry.

lol, noted

Thanks for the feedback, the website and any part of the brand is open-source, so if you feel like contributing, you may start a discussion on GitHub or make a PR :)

i'd suggest that he looks like he's just waiting for his chance to fuck up your stuff.

He looks like he's mocking you because your tests failed.

It's a Batman (The Dark Knight) reference: "He's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now"

I suspect the grandparent knew this, and was making the point that the reference isn't sending a good message.

I really like this idea. I think more tools should integrate into GitHub this way. The status API is nice, but you always have to click through to get the details.

I think you could do something similar with code analysis tools, so they make review comments in the code where issues occur.

I know this is nit-picky, but I'm not a fan of how the "Details" link opens in the same tab.

Not sure what do you mean

Thanks, that's an awesome idea. :)

For those not using Travis, ci-reporter supports CircleCI too, and is extensible to support any other CI platform.

https://github.com/JasonEtco/ci-reporter

Really cool! I'm going to give it a try. I've been looking to build our Travis CI more in-depth.

Cute little list on the example screenshot. looks at own code with some 3300 tests

I'm not a travis user, but with Jenkins there is an xunit plugin that opens up an api with test results for the specific build. since xunit formatting is standard/generic, we've implemented a parser that just gets the # of pass/failed tests and links to the build for further investigation.

We had a similar problem where posting all of the results was just more noise than useful, this is at least a good starting point for handling build result feedback.

We have methods to handle big build logs, and we have a backlog full of ideas on how to improve the way we handle big logs.

mocha -R min

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