Software architecture and engineering culture converge at the Continuous Integration (CI) system. It is absolutely essential that a CI system be easy to understand. Every failed test is a context switch. Each test failure must be actionable, with a clear path to resolution. Unreliable or obscure tests will sow confusion and degrade confidence. Building a comprehensible, usable CI is a problem space that is new and largely unexplored by the User Experience community. I do not claim to have solved the problem. But I look forward to sharing screenshots, anecdotes, things that have gone wrong, and the story of how the color yellow turned out not to be as scary as I thought.

1. The User Experience of
Continuous Integration
Systems
Noah Sussman
Penguicon 2012
Dearborn, MI

2. Chad Dickerson Describes the History of Etsy

3. Approximately 30 deploys a day,
every business day, all year.
That’s one deploy approximately
every twenty minutes, all day.

5. “an airport without an air traffic controller”
Chad Dickerson

6. “Continuous deployment is
Confidence-As-A-Service”
~John Allspaw

7. Cognitive Load
Developers are always maxed out.
Every failed test is a context switch.

8. Busy, distracted people are not great
at making decisions.
Good tools make it easy to make
good decisions under pressure.

9. Every alert, test failure and IRC
message must have a clearly
actionable path to resolution.

10. What does it mean when a test
passes?

11. The Active
User Paradox

12. Users never read manuals
Users would save time in the long
term by learning more about the
system. But that's not how people
behave in the real world
~Jakob Nielsen

13. Declaring a
program
“bug free,”
is an
entirely
subjective
excercise

14. Complete testing is impossible.

15. Sufficient testing is desirable.

16. So, what does it mean when a test
passes?
The design of a CI system is all about
making it possible to quickly make
that judgement call and to do it with
confidence.

18. What is an unstable build?
Red means stop,
what does yellow mean?
Red is scary, yellow isn’t scary.

19. Everyone’s build process is different.
Everyone’s CI is different.
UX conventions for CI are few.

20. Listen to your users

21. Iteratively modify the
system to better meet
the expectations of
your users

36. Good tools make it easy to make
good decisions under pressure.
All notifications must be actionable.
We need to work toward establishing
a UX design vocabulary for CI.

37. etsy.com/careers @noahsussman
Mashable Cubicle Spy