1229782 - Make the long job description tooltip in the job details panel more discoverable

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tree Management :: Treeherder, defect, P3)

Description

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1052489 +++

I am not sure when/why it has been removed but it would be great to have the description displayed.

The patch is pretty much the same as in bug 1052489.

Comment 1

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Attachment: PR

Comment 2

[Jonathan French (:jfrench)]

(In reply to Sylvestre Ledru [:sylvestre] from comment #0)
> +++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1052489 +++
> 
> I am not sure when/why it has been removed but it would be great to have the
> description displayed.
> 

Ed can confirm but as far as I recall, bug 1052489 was changed later by bug 1153834 and its associated PR https://github.com/mozilla/treeherder-ui-deprecated/pull/461 to avoid DOM bloat.

Comment 3

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

They were removed intentionally in bug 1153834, since:
* it was bloating the DOM
* the same information is available in the job details panel (hover over "Job name" to see the tooltip). We could probably make the existence of that tooltip more obvious (eg an "i" info icon) if that would help?
* The job description is currently empty for a log of jobs - the current model for populating it isn't working well.

Expanding on the last point:

For example, jobs that have numbered chunks have each chunk treated separately. This means that the description has to be entered for every chunk number, meaning most of them are missing (since chunking has been increased in automation). The schema needs to be changed such that the chunk number is separated (something that we've been wanting to do for a while, but affects a lot of things, so will take time).

I think it would also make sense for the submitters of job results to handle the setting of description (like they do for symbol and group name etc) - I don't think it's scalable for Treeherder to track this.

As such, I don't think we should take this. I would be open for a bug that made the job details panel description tooltip more discoverable though? :-)

Comment 4

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

(In reply to Ed Morley (Away 1st-2nd, 4th Dec) [:emorley] from comment #3)
> They were removed intentionally in bug 1153834, since:
> * it was bloating the DOM
> * the same information is available in the job details panel

Sorry to be clearer: bug 1153834 didn't remove them per-se, but moved them from the main jobs view to the job details panel.

Comment 5

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

As you wish guys, you are the owners :)
I will update my PR to add the description in the job details panel.

Comment 6

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

Fwiw by looking at https:// treeherder.mozilla.org/api/jobtype/ (don't open in a browser, the browsable API will hang it), over half have a description of "fill me" (2522 out of 4204 job types).

Comment 7

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

I filed bug 1229826 to get rid of the silly "fill me" placeholders from the source tree.

Comment 8

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Ed, I updated my PR.
About the "fill me", maybe we can find some volunteers to help here. Is there an easy way to update these values? (I have/had the access in treeherder admin to be able to update them).

Comment 9

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

(In reply to Sylvestre Ledru [:sylvestre] from comment #5)
> As you wish guys, you are the owners :)

This isn't about us being the owners, this is about us all collectively trying to improve the UI - and so for that thank you for starting the discussion :-)

The current UI definitely has many areas that could be improved - and perhaps in the future needs several modes (beginner vs advanced and/or a settings section where things can be toggled) to serve all use-cases as best as possible.

That said, whatever the UI, there is always going to be more attributes for a job than can be shown at the very top level of the UI. 

eg for each job we have:
* job symbol
* job name
* job long text description
* group
* platform
* start/end time
* duration
* result
* error lines
* talos results
* various other tinderboxprint strings
* log URLs
* failure classification / bug numbers
...etc

And for each we have to decide in which place (or places) it should be surfaced, out of:
* The main UI view (without clicking a job)
* The tooltip shown when hovering over a job symbol
* The left hand section of the job details panel (after clicking on a job)
* The additional tabs on the job details panel
* Tooltips on items in the job details panel
* A help page / some other "show all job types" UI

A few of the considerations are:
* how many people use that attribute on a regular basis
* how often that information is required for all jobs vs just a few jobs (eg there's no point surfacing the tinderboxprints for all jobs in the main view)
* the UI responsiveness/memory usage impact
* the UI clutter impact
* the impact on the Treeherder API of having to return that attribute for *every* job rather than only needing to fetch it on demand when someone clicks the job in question
...

For me the "several sentence description" doesn't meet the bar of being exposed in the top level UI (even in the tooltip), according to that list. It should definitely be made more discoverable elsewhere - either by making the job details panel tooltip more obvious - or even by adding a new "job explorer" page to Treeherder somewhere :-)

> I will update my PR to add the description in the job details panel.

It's already present, it just needs to be made more obvious (comment 3 / comment 4):
https://github.com/mozilla/treeherder/blob/dfccdf1668a94847588150ee47e715b3dc042587/ui/plugins/pluginpanel.html#L189

Comment 10

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

(In reply to William Lachance (:wlach) from comment #7)
> I filed bug 1229826 to get rid of the silly "fill me" placeholders from the
> source tree.

Awesome - thanks :-)

(In reply to Sylvestre Ledru [:sylvestre] from comment #8)
> Ed, I updated my PR.

Thank you for updating it - I meant more to add an info icon to make the fact that the tooltip is there more obvious. I think as-is the description (for the cases where it's populated) will be long enough to push the more commonly used information down "below the fold" in the job details panel). However I'd have to try the change locally to be sure (which I'll do once I'm back from PTO).

> About the "fill me", maybe we can find some volunteers to help here. Is
> there an easy way to update these values? (I have/had the access in
> treeherder admin to be able to update them).

I'm not sure it's worth doing at the moment - as mentioned in comment 3, the current "chunking being included in job signature" issue requires quite a refactor (which we'll want to do anyway at some point), such that any effort now will be wasted.

Comment 11

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

(In reply to Ed Morley (Away 1st-2nd, 4th Dec) [:emorley] from comment #10)
> I'm not sure it's worth doing at the moment 

Meant to add: We've even talked about removing the description entirely from Treeherder (unless we can come up with a more sustainable way of populating it for new jobs, eg submitters providing it per comment 3), so I'd hold off adding more for now.

Comment 12

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

Yeah I think we should go with the info icon mentioned in comment 3 and comment 10; as-is it makes the job details panel too cluttered / pushes other info below the fold -- when 90% of people don't need this information.

Comment 13

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

(In reply to Ed Morley (Away 15th Dec-4th Jan) [:emorley] from comment #12)
> Yeah I think we should go with the info icon mentioned in comment 3 and
> comment 10; as-is it makes the job details panel too cluttered / pushes
> other info below the fold -- when 90% of people don't need this information.

I do not agree with this argument. The point here is to help the 10 % of people.
Letters don't mean anything for new comers, same with our project names (Luciddream, marionnette, mochitest, xpcshell, etc). This provides some guidances to understand the purpose of the testsuite.

Comment 14

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

An info bubble next to an item is a pretty commonly used UX affordance; with that the 10% should not have a problem seeing that there's more info available. Or is there a reason why you believe this not to be the case?

Comment 15

[GitHub Autolander Bot]

Attachment: [treeherder] KWierso:1229782 > mozilla:master

Comment 16

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

Comment on attachment 8767442 [details] [review]
[treeherder] KWierso:1229782 > mozilla:master

How about this?

Comment 17

[Treeherder GitHub Bugbot]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/treeherder

https://github.com/mozilla/treeherder/commit/101f82df06703ec10345705f3808528423e17537
Bug 1229782 - Add an info icon for cases where the job name has a description hiding in a tooltip (#1642) r=emorley