So the point here is that the weather icons are slightly misunderstood and underused.

Way back in the way back, a colleague and I were looking to get some extra information onto the Jenkins (then Hudson) jobs screen. I had some chats with KK over IRC and at the time he did not want to open up having multiple columns in the jobs screen. His then view of the world is that the jobs screen should be somewhat opinionated and clean.

So I said, well what about if we add just a second icon beside the status ball and if you hover over it you get a tooltip that displays some detail message. KK said that didn't seem so bad... so off hacking I went.

What I wanted was a kind of health column that would tell you the worst health of your job at a glance.

The idea we had was that some jobs may have low test coverage, some jobs may have a flaky build, some jobs may have lots of TODO comments in the code, etc. So you would define the criterial levels of each metric and score jobs against those levels.

Then we would pick the worst score and display an icon for that score.

So off looking for icons I went... keeping in with the Tango theme that was used by the project at the time...

My initial idea was that you would maybe have a heart that gets into worse and worse shape as the score went from 100% to 0%... but the red colour was too distracting...

So I soon realized that - unlike the status balls - we wanted something that was not quite as high a contrast. You want to see the status balls first... if something is yellow or red, you fix that first... only when everything is blue do you want to start looking at the health (which is why the column is called "H")

What I did find is that the weather icons gave me 5 levels of "health" and were subtle enough not to distract from the red and yellow balls... plus my colleague and I thought it would be really cool to have the code coverage metric be an umbrella and as the code coverage gets worse the umbrella would loose bits of fabric so that 0% coverage would be a tattered frame.

So I had my patch and submitted it to KK and it got merged and the rest is history.

For the initial patch I wanted there to be something for every job already, so the default job health is based on the last 5 builds (because there are only 5 levels of the default icons, and scanning any more would just be pointless)

We also added contributors for the code coverage plugins and the violations plugin (which my colleague was the initial author of)

Then of course you get distracted in other things...

What disappoints me greatly is that in the 700 or so releases of Jenkins that have had the weather icons... nobody has actually gone and implemented the custom icons for job health feature that is embedded directly in the code and was available from the very first day the patch landed...

I don't know if this is because the weather icons are just enough... or if it is because nobody noticed that you can do that...

I know for the code coverage icon, neither Peter nor I are good enough artists to come up with 5 levels of umbrella in various states of disrepair... another idea was a pie chart or a small trend graph... but we always seemed to have more important things to do... and since I joined CloudBees I've been too busy to get back to that area.

So anyway, I guess my point is that the weather icons were designed to be more subtle than the build status and the API was designed to allow plugins to contribute their own health and even their own icons... but whatever about other plugins contributing to health reports... nobody has bothered to contribute the customized icons!

-Stephen (the originator of the weather icons in Jenkins)