README.md

Lighthouse Auditing Bot for Mattermost

Table of Contents

• Hackfest Proposal
  • Summary
  • Problem Statement
  • Feature List
  • Use Cases
  • Approach

Hackfest Proposal

Summary

This project seeks to provide added value to the Mattermost ecosystem by adding performance auditing of websites with Google's Lighthouse, offering a testing environment that is accessible directly from any Mattermost channel.

Problem Statement

• Website auditing is an often overlooked part of front-end development because of how difficult it is to integrate it to the developers' daily workflow
• Even when periodically used, auditing with Lighthouse can prove to be unreliable* when running on the client-side** because:
  • The internet speed on a given client can vary, causing significant variations in the following metrics:
    • Time to interactive
    • First Contentful Paint
    • First Meaningful Paint
  • Processes running in the background of a computer can have on impact on the results with regards to performance
• It's difficult to share the results of a performance audit with the rest of the team
• There's no current way to track performance over time

* Performance tests are most reliable when minimizing the number of variables impacting their results
** Tests ran either through the Chrome developer tools' audit tab, or through the Lighthouse plugin on a browser

Use Cases

• The development team uses a /lighthouse https://siteurl.com command to quickly run an audit of their website's performance, and have the results shared in Mattermost for all the team to see.
  
  • A brief overview is displayed in-channel, with a link provided to a HTML template that displays the results of a given audit
• Running the /lighthouse stats https://siteurl.com to view the changes in performance over time as a chart
• Scheduling audit tasks for various sites that display the latest values, and the performance trend over time for a given site using /lighthouse jobs command and selecting options in a returned dialog

Approach

The overall approach of this project is to create a private lighthouse testbed that is tightly integrated with Mattermost. Offering a wide list of features that prioritize ease of usage.

Feature List

	Ad-hoc audit testing through slash commands
	Scheduling of periodic audits (daily, or weekly)
	Viewing performance trends as charts directly from Mattermost
	Have access to the full report generated as HTML files by Lighthouse

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