Builds Status Overview

By Christophe Dujarric, on Jun 21, 2018

Blackfire is an amazing tool to automate PHP code performance testing (and also quality and security testing). It can be integrated in Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployments processes. It can be running tests periodically on your production apps. It can be triggered in many different ways, depending your needs and tooling.

This “small” UI increment is here to help you understand the health of your app over time. Each day, a new bar will let you know in the blink of an eye how many builds succeeded, failed or errored.

Now an interesting question: what should be the right color balance on those graphs?

Obviously, when such a graph is all red, you’ve got some issues. And the biggest one is that no action has been taken to resolve this. Are you notified in the right place when your builds fail? Have you written actionable tests? Remember tests on time aren’t necessarily a good idea.

But does it mean it should all be green? Green’s great, but are your tests demanding enough? You probably shouldn’t be satisfied your builds a green if you only test is main.wall_time < 5s passes.

Knowing when to stop optimizing is as important as knowing where to start.

Happy profiling,

Christophe Dujarric

Christophe is the Chief Product Officer at Blackfire. He's an engineer, but probably one of the least "tech" people in the company. He's wearing many hats, from product management to marketing and sales. He loves the beauty of simple solutions that solve actual problems.