We sometimes introduce a new CI check that we want to experiment with and therefore mark it as Soft Fail. This usually causes a bunch of confusion for engineers because they’ll see a red step and assume that their build failed. For those who aren’t BK savvy, it’s not very obvious that the step is marked as soft fail. I think it would be nice to have soft fail steps be represented differently. Either just hide them or make them not red. Or clearly indicate somewhere that “this doesn’t affect your build.”
This comes up for basically every new team member who has to ask how the build is green for their branch when they have failures, we would really like this to be more clear.
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This is definitely a very common source of confusion, and it’d be great if the soft fail indicator was a “gentler” colour at the very least
+1 to this, I just got confused by this.
I think my ideal solution would be some sort of candy-cane look
or, at the very least, a mouse-over tooltip “soft fail” if you mouse over the build step?
We thoroughly agree that it’s not ideal! And, as it happens, we are currently working on a usability update to make this more obvious, and help making build failures more obvious and actionable. Stay tuned!
Glad to hear, thanks!
Thanks for the update, @sj26 ! Do you know if this is still on the roadmap / backlog at all?
Ah, I did notice that there were differences! Thanks for the quick reply. If the team is open to feedback, I’m still not sure this is clear enough, especially if there are only soft fails in the build. Granted, it may just take some getting used to 
A couple of suggestions for future enhancements to possibly reduce confusion:
- Warning color vs “danger” or “error”. Yellow/Mustards are common
- No background, just border and icon.
Hi @emerson 
Welcome to the community!
Thank you for this feedback! We’ll pass this along to the team
Cheers,
Lizette
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Hey. Small message to say that even with the new design we face that issue on a regular basis. Would be worth having a more different design for soft fail.
Hey @louis
Thank you for raising this, we appreciate your feedback.
Could you please elaborate on what specific changes or differences would help you better distinguish the soft fail?
Although I don’t have a timeline for when it will be addressed, your input is valuable to us.
I would guess that a different color would help. Maybe yellow. And the icon could be removed or replaced with something like 
, which has less error energy.
Hey @louis!
Thanks for you follow up!
We made some changes recently with the UI to reduce the prominence of the red colour, do you think it’s an improvement?
With regards to using yellow, do you think that may lead to confusion with running steps?
Cheers!
I forgot that currently running steps are yellow, sorry about that. The reduced prominence of red is better yes, thanks. Could the warning icon also be switched to grey then? And probably for groups the color of the box with the counter on the right would have to be changed too?
Hello, @louis! Thank you for the clarification. I have passed it on to the responsible team.