Improve compact pipeline design in merge requests
Right now pipeline MR widget is consuming a lot of space while providing very little useful information:
The useful bits are the following:
- Pipeline URL
- Pipeline status
- Failed stages
However most of the widget space is consumed by stage status icons, which do not bring any useful information on their own. For example why you should know that stages 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 have completed successfully at any point? When you're working or reviewing an MR the most important thing to you are the jobs that have failed (unless you're changing the CI file and now the green stages actually DO become important). With this design you'll have to search for every failed job by going through all the failed stages, which takes time.
To address that we've added a Failed jobs control on the Pipelines tab:
But it's not present on the Overview tab at all unfortunately. Also, all the issues also apply to the pipelines view, even though we have the Failed jobs control.
We might consider reworking the compact pipelines MR widget to:
- Be context-aware: represent information that's actually relevant to the user
- Do not clutter the UI: anything that's not useful to the user shouldn't be displayed in a compact view