Buildfarmer Dashboard launches as public CI health monitor for ROS & Gazebo

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) Infrastructure PMC, through its buildfarmer subteam, has publicly launched the Buildfarmer Dashboard—a centralized, self-service interface for monitoring the health of ROS and Gazebo continuous integration (CI). Previously, developers and contributors had to manually reach out to buildfarmers or search through GitHub issues to understand why a test was failing. The dashboard now offers a read-only, publicly accessible view into several key metrics: active test regressions (including the date the failure first appeared and which OS/architecture combinations are affected), flaky tests (with rolling-window failure rates and cross-platform signatures), suspect commits (a direct GitHub compare link between the last successful build and the first failing build), and known issues with current triage status (under investigation or stale, manually maintained by buildfarmers). This dramatically reduces the time needed to diagnose CI problems and empowers community members to self-triage without burdening infrastructure maintainers.

Beyond providing transparency, the Buildfarmer Dashboard aims to improve overall project velocity. The buildfarmers—@miguelgonrod and @Crola1702—emphasize that this is a first public release and are actively seeking community feedback. They specifically ask about navigability (is it clear where to find information?), usefulness (does the data help triage failures?), missing context (is there data that users routinely need but isn't surfaced?), and any UI/performance suggestions. The dashboard serves not only regular ROS and Gazebo contributors but also newcomers trying to understand the infrastructure for the first time. By making CI health visible and actionable, the OSRF team hopes to increase developer productivity, reduce redundant bug reports, and foster a more self-sufficient community. Future iterations may incorporate additional features based on community input, with the long-term goal of making CI monitoring as seamless as possible for the thousands of developers relying on ROS and Gazebo for robotics applications.