Allow an "estimated duration" for jobs and show a progress indicator

It might be cool if, when specifying a job, it were possible to supply an “estimated job duration” field. The build/job UI could then display some sort of progress indicator comparing elapsed wall-clock time to estimated duration. Of course it would not be perfect, but some rough indication would be helpful. We have some short jobs (< 1 min) and some really long ones (~ 1 hour): making this obvious at a glance could be a win.

It could be left to whoever builds the pipeline to provide an estimate or BK could track historical data and do it automatically.

Hello @shannon!

Thanks for reaching out and for the suggestion! I don’t believe this sort of idea has been brought up before so I’ll raise the feedback to get ideas with Product around it.

Cheers :+1:

Hi @shannon thanks for the feedback. I am from the product team and I’d love to understand a bit more of what you need.

Could you tell me what you’re trying to understand. Are you trying to see if your build is drastically over the average? If yes what do you do with this information next? Does it trigger you to update your steps or look at the commit that caused it or run it on a larger agent?

Do you look at this average information on a step level? Or overall build level?

And what is a problematic case for you? Is it when it is %50 over the average etc?

We will be looking into giving you metrics like that later in the year so let me know if you would like to be involved in user tests involving step/build metrics.

Thank you!

Could you tell me what you’re trying to understand

I’d just like to get a feel, at a glance, for how long to expect to wait for the build to complete. Do we have a couple of seconds remaining? A couple of minutes? An hour? Displaying this information at the step level would be most useful.

Jenkins does something like this by calculating an estimate based on the last 3 builds or so and then drawing a progress bar comparing the estimate with the elapsed time.

Noticing if build times are over the average could also be interesting for noticing problems, but is not the primary intent of the feature suggestion.

Yes, I’d be happy to be involved in user tests.

Hi again @shannon. Please forgive me in my delay in getting back to you.

I understand, so your main goal is to understand how long you’ll have to wait. There are no optimisation concerns. You might get this information as part of the metrics we expose later in the year.