While sheriffing yesterday and today, I ran into multiple devices being blacklisted, which resulted in host_info and all tests run on that device to be red. But redness implies that the test itself is broken instead of there being an infra/device issue.
When I'm sheriffing, I always look into purple builds before the red ones because: A) purple builds generally affect more than one test, so there is more data being lost while the issue continues. B) purple builds can hide other failures, and C) purple builds are generally faster for me to handle than red ones since they usually require hand off to infra.
From my experience, host_info failing is generally caused by a device being blacklisted for hw or other non-test related issues, causes multiple performance tests to not run, and has to get handed off to Infra for debugging/fixing of the issue. It would be helpful if these failures were a different color than the other failing tests, at least for the host_info step and the build color, so that they can get prioritized by our sheriffs.
I'd be fine with it being purple, but don't know how infra would feel about that since some of the tests are likely still running (and passing).
Comment 1 by smut@chromium.org
, Mar 24 2016