KernelCI working group: Web Dashboard

Hi Greg,

Quoted 51 lines · Greg KH

Quoted 50 lines · Guillaume Tucker

Last year's KernelCI Community Survey[1] showed the importance of having a good web dashboard. About 70% of respondents would use one if it provided the information they needed efficiently. While other things are arguably even more important, such as testing patches from mailing lists, replying to stable reviews and sending email reports directly to contributors in a "natural" workflow, the web dashboard has been a sticking point for a while.

There have been several attempts at solving this problem, using Elastic Stack and Grafana among other things, but there isn't a single framework able to directly provide an off-the-shelf solution to the community's needs. In fact, the first issue is the lack of understanding of these needs: who wants to use the web dashboard, and how? Then, how does one translate those needs into a user interface? Doing this requires skills that engineers who regularly contribute to KernelCI typically don't have. As such, a dedicated working group is being created in order to fill this gap.

The aim is to coordinate efforts and try to follow best practices to make steady progress and avoid repeating the same mistakes. Most likely, we will need some help from proper web developers who aren't part of the usual KernelCI community. This may be facilitated by the KernelCI LF project budget if approved by the governing board.

In order to get started, we would need to have maybe 3 to 5 people available to focus on this. It doesn't necessarily mean a lot of hours spent but actions to be carried out on a daily or weekly basis. So far we have Gustavo Padovan as our new KernelCI Project Manager and a few people have expressed interest but we still need formal confirmation.

Here's a GitHub project dedicated to the new web dashboard:

https://github.com/orgs/kernelci/projects/4

I've created a couple of issues to get started about user stories, and some initial milestones as a basic skeleton:

https://github.com/kernelci/kernelci-project/milestones

This is ultimately a community-driven effort to address the needs of the kernel community. Please share any thoughts you may have on this, whether you want to add some user stories, share some expertise, be officially in the working group or take part in this effort in any other way.

Quoted 3 lines

How do we "join" the working group? I'm willing to help out from the "user who will use this a lot and complain about things that do not work well" point of view :)

Congratulations! You are now part of the working group. :) For now, anyone that is interested can step up, and maybe in a few weeks we can formalize with those who wants to take on the journey together with us in this working group.

Based on the replies to this thread I can put together an initial agenda and follow up with the potential times for a kick-off meeting.