Why do I see the completed pipeline status as "Paused"?

Dinara Tablina

All my completed pipelines in all repositories today got status "Paused" instead of "Completed". What can be the reason of that changes?

Edmund Munday

Hi all - apologies for the confusion around this change. There are several small incremental changes currently underway designed to give users more a more explicit set of statuses for builds - in addition to giving users more tools to better manage those statuses - what you are seeing right now is one step, of several, that are underway to "rationalise" the way statuses are used, and also give you all more flexibility.

What's changed so far:

There have been two changes so far, with a few more to come.

• The first change was purely cosmetic, changing the status colour for "Stopped" builds from an amber "warning" style colour, to a grey "Subtle" style colour.
  • This was done as a build that is "Stoped" has been put into that status via an active decision by a user, therefore it does not need immediate attention and should not be showing a "warning" colour.
• The second change was to make the UI representation of "Paused" steps actually match their underlying status in the system (this is the change that's causing the confusion). Note - this is a UI change only, designed to increase the overall consistency and understandability of the UI. No behavioural changes have occurred due to this.
  • Specifically, this affects Pipelines that contain steps with a "manual" trigger, most often used for manually approving deployments, however also sometimes used to control optional steps that people might run at the end of a pipeline.
  • Important to note that these pipelines have always been considered "Paused" in the system, and that has always been reflected in the UI when filtering pipelines by status.
    • When filtering by "Paused" status, these Pipelines have always been displayed.
    • When filtering by "Successful" status, these Pipelines have always been hidden
  • However, the actual text + colour shown in the "Status" column for these pipelines previously showed "Successful", even though that was not the correct status for these pipelines in the system.
    • This made it effectively impossible to differentiate between pipelines that were actually "Successful", vs ones that were simply "Paused" without using the status filter to seperate the two.
    • It was also highly inconsistent as the status filter did not visually match what the user was seeing in the UI under the "status" column.
  • To be clear, we understand this creates an inconvenience in situations where customers have "paused" pipelines that they have no intention of actually completing, such as when they have got "optional" steps at the end of their workflow controlled via the "manual" trigger.

What's still coming:

• The third change that we are planning to implement is designed to address this scenario by allowing customer to manually move a "paused" pipeline out of that "paused" state, and into one of several possible final states.
  • This will allow customers to mark a "Paused" pipeline as "Successful" or potentially some other "Cancelled" state, if they do not intend to execute the manually triggered steps, but do not want to leave it in a "Paused" state.
• Future: We are also considering the option of marking some steps as explicitly "optional", which would allow them to not affect the overall pipeline status at all. This is a larger change that is not happening in the immediate future though.

Feedback request:

• It's clear from the feedback here that, while these changes are making things more consistent and explicit on one side, they may be disrupting peoples workflows on another.
  • Specifically - there is a distinction between when a pipeline is "paused" due to some kind of system controlled mechanism (e.g a deployment lock), where that pipeline needs human interaction, vs a pipeline that was paused due to a decision made by the user via their pipelines .yml file (e.g a manual trigger).
  • While these are both still "Paused", they are a different in terms of their severity. A system enforced "pause" (referred to as a "halted" state internally) is one that requires relatively immediate manual intervention. A workflow enforced "pause" does not.
  • One simple option would be to seperate these two state's into two distinct options - "Paused" for workflow enforced states (e.g manual triggers), and "Halted" for system enforced.
    • In this scenario, "paused" would show as the green "Success" colour, and "halted" as the amber "Warning" colour.