Pop-up windows: hooray to modeless user interfaces
Pop-up windows are a very popular element of the TeamCity web user interface. Consider having a fully-featured continuous integration web-application that collects all possible data regarding VCS changes, tests, build output, build configuration settings, etc, etc, etc. When a problem occurs, we must guide the user through this mish-mash of various data directly (well, ideally) to the problem diagnostics.
Which tests failed?
Who was committing to this build?
Which files?
What code got changed?
Which build output reports are available for this build?
In TeamCity you don’t have to leave the overview page to find the answers. Iteratively, we found the way of showing build details in a modeless way:
Before that we tried showing pop-ups on link hovering, but that required considerable time for our users to get used to.
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