CI test pipeline dashboard for engineering managers

An engineering manager running Apache Yetus or a similar CI pre-commit testing setup needs to answer a basic question: which downstream projects are consistently failing, which tests are flaky, and where is the team losing time? Right now the answer is buried in console logs and per-project CI output that requires someone who understands the pipeline architecture to interpret. The complaint about 'the interface for downstream projects could be a little better' understates it — there's no aggregated view at all, just raw per-project output.

This gap persists because tools like Yetus are built to serve the test runner, not the person managing the team running tests. The contributor base cares about correctness of the test infrastructure, not about making the results digestible to someone who manages six engineers. The buyer — if there even is one — is often a VP of Engineering who approved the open-source stack and has no idea what the output looks like day to day.

What engineering managers actually need is a view that shows test failure rates by project over time, highlights which projects have the most unstable downstream dependencies, and flags when a new commit broke something that was previously stable — without requiring them to read XML or parse log files. The 'some debugging and refining ahead, graphic and export/import bugs' complaints point to another real cost: when the output itself is unreliable, managers can't trust the data they're trying to act on.

This is a business because the need recurs every sprint, every release, every time someone asks 'why is CI so slow this week.' The alternative is a developer spending an afternoon building a custom dashboard in Grafana or a spreadsheet that goes stale in two weeks.

What to build

Build a read-only web dashboard that ingests CI test results from Apache Yetus and common CI systems via their APIs or log output, aggregates pass/fail/flaky rates by project and test suite over time, and emails a weekly digest to engineering managers with the three most unstable areas highlighted.

Where to start

Target Apache committers and open-source foundation engineering leads first — they're already public about their CI pain, their infrastructure is partially public so you can build the ingestion layer without needing private access, and a credible open-source reference customer unlocks enterprise sales.

The hard part

Getting the first customer requires access to a real Yetus or multi-project CI setup to validate the ingestion layer — most engineering managers won't trial something that requires production CI access before they've seen it work, so you need a reference customer who trusts you enough to let you in.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription per engineering team at $150–300/month, with a free read-only tier for public repositories to build credibility with open-source projects before converting private-repo enterprise teams.