16. MQC Details¶

In this chapter, we will take you through the steps involved in performing a detailed quality evaluation in MQC. This will give you a good impression of the functional details of MQC. At the same time, it helps you get accustomed to the tool in a more detailed way than in Quick Start Guide where a quick introduction to the basic functionality of MQC is given.

Building on this and taking into account the dashboards for a project conclusions about the development of software projects are described. Based on these conclusions MQC shows possible reasons for bad quality and helps you deducing actions to carry out for improving quality.

16.1. The MQC dashboard¶

MQC consists of a default dashboard of overview pages that contain all the important information of your project. The dashboard consists of data and quality pages, showing trend and status respectively, i.e. Quality Trend and Quality Status, as well as Data Trend and Data Status.

The Quality Trend page will give an overview of the quality of your project, whereas the Quality Status, Quality Sunburst and Quality Heatmap page provides an in-depth analysis of Artifacts, i.e. an overview of the quality of each Artifact.

The Quality Model page gives information about the definition of your Quality Properties. It will show you any kind of validation errors.

The Data Status page will give you an overview of the data of your project. By means of Data Details functionality (Data Details) you will get from quality pages, such as Quality Status or Quality Sunburst to the data pages to track the source of a measurement, i.e. going one level down on data source level to Data Trend where you can see your raw data’s trend and get an overview of your related base measures.

The general concept of these pages is that all the visualizations are interactive: If you click into any of the visualizations, the other visualizations will react in a top-down / left-right manner and then show information related to what you have marked. You can do the major selections on the left and top sections of the visualization window and the effect can be seen in the bottom right visualizations.

Marking is cumulative. The marked elements of the first chart will not reset if you mark something in the next chart later. The effect is a combination of marking done in both the charts. To go back to normal state click on the chart where there are no elements.

In dependence of the Project Structures you have imported, the right side panel will display options for filtering the data (see details in Filtering).

In the following subsections the four main pages as mentioned above are described:

16.1.1. Data Trend page¶

By means of the Data Trend page, you can track the source of a measurement, going one level down compared to the Data Status page, i.e. on data source level. You can see your raw data’s progression and processing getting an overview of your derived and related base measures.

It consists of the following selecting windows:

Projects (on the top left): Select your project as defined in your project structure. Notice, that you see an availability trend inside the tile. A gradient availability coloring is used that depends on the availability of all measure values for all artifacts shown for the most recent revision.
Artifacts (Bottom left): Select the artifacts of your choice. By default, all are selected. A gradient availability coloring is used that depends on the availability of the measure values for a single artifact for the most recent revision.
Measures (next to Artifacts): The count of the measures is with respect to all artifacts and for the last revision. It uses a gradient availability coloring.
Availability Distribution: This is a bar chart, which bins the amount of available, missing and propagated data for each revision… A categorical availability coloring is used.

The Measure Trend visualization shows per Artifact for each measure value (base measures and derived measures) a trend over all revisions. If a certain revision is selected, the data value for this specific revision is shown only. It is possible to only show the trends for a single or for selected artifacts as well as for selected measures. The Measure Trend visualization uses a dedicated color per trend line for each measure value.

16.1.2. Data Status page¶

The Data Status page offers the following selecting windows:

Projects (on the top left): Select your project as defined in your project structure. Notice, that you see an availability trend inside the tile. A gradient availability coloring is used that depends on the availability of all measure values for all artifacts shown for the most recent revision.
Artifacts (Bottom left): Select the artifacts of your choice. By default, all are selected. A gradient availability coloring is used that depends on the availability of the measure values for a single artifact for the most recent revision.
Availability Distribution: This is a bar chart, which bins the amount of available, propagated, missing data and data to which a default value is applied for each revision. It uses a categorical availability coloring.

The Availability Treemap is the reacting window to the selections (intersections) made by the marking in the selecting windows mentioned above. It also uses a categorical availability coloring.

16.1.3. Quality Status page¶

The Quality Status page provides an in-depth analysis of Artifacts. Therefore, it will give an overview of the quality of each Artifact.

Selecting windows are:

Projects (on the top left): Select your project as defined in your project structure for which you want to see quality. If you have defined only a single project, it is selected by default. You can reset the marking for the entire page at any point by clicking on this tile. Notice, that you see a quality trend over all revisions inside the tile. A gradient quality coloring is used that depends on the overall quality for all artifacts, shown for the most recent revision.
Artifacts (Bottom left): Select the Artifacts of your choice. By default, all are selected. The values within the tiles are always related to the latest revision. A gradient quality coloring is used that depends on the quality for each artifact, shown for the most recent revision.
Quality properties (next to Artifacts): Select the Quality Property. Note, that the Properties tiles are listed in ascending order of quality measure. If the quality measure cannot be computed, then it appears in the bottom of the list with an empty value. The values within the tiles are always of the latest revision. A gradient quality coloring is used.
Quality Bin Distribution (top): The computed quality property measures are mainly binned as Good, Acceptable and Bad. By marking the bins in this visualization you can do selections based on the computed quality status of all quality properties per revision. You can also select the revision of the data by selecting all the bins of the same revision. For example, if you select the green bin of the latest revision on the Quality Bin Distribution visualization, the reacting window shows an overview of all information related to good quality measures for this revision. For the bins a categorical quality coloring is used.

The reacting window is a heatmap visualization plotted for each Artifact against each Quality Property. Each Quality Property tile has a gradient quality coloring, which represents the quality value for the particular property. Based on the marking from the selecting windows, the boxes in the heatmap are highlighted.

You can now start identifying the reason for bad quality. The general concept of identifying issues is to click on (or hover over) red quality bins or tiles. When clicking on red, data that corresponds to green and yellow bins is excluded from the chart visualizations to receive a first impression of the reason for bad quality, concretely the quality properties that have failed.

16.1.4. Quality Sunburst page¶

The Quality Sunburst page will give an overview of the quality of your project.

The selecting windows are the same as on the Quality Status page, just the main visualization shows the sunburst visualization where the outer ring consists of all quality properties defined by the quality model (see section Quality Properties).

16.1.5. Quality Heatmap page¶

The Quality Heatmap page will give an overview of the quality of your project.

The selecting windows are the same as on the Quality Status page, just the main visualization shows a more detailed heat map visualization, where quality properties and artifacts are visualized with their aggregation and respective “size” (weight).

16.1.6. Quality Trend page¶

The Quality Trend page will give an overview of the quality of your project.

The selecting windows are the same as on the Quality Status and Quality Sunburst page.

Quality Trend by Artifact and Quality Trend by Property are the reacting windows. These line chart visualizations are updated based on your previous selections.

The trend visualizations use a categorical coloring, so each line representing an Artifact resp. a quality property uses a dedicated color.

16.2. Color Schemes¶

On Quality Pages (i.e. Quality Status page, Quality Sunburst page and Quality Trend page), MQC uses the traffic light color scheme:


	Good	All quality properties with an evaluated quality between 80% - 100%
	Acceptable	All quality properties with an evaluated quality between 20% - 80%
	Bad	All quality properties with an evaluated quality between 0% - 20%
	Missing	Quality cannot be evaluated because of missing quality measure values

Gradient	Description
Coloring
	100% quality	A gradient coloring is mainly used for certain elements that have a computed or aggregated quality value assigned (e.g. for projects, artifacts and quality properties)
	50% quality
	0% quality
	No quality value available

On Availability Pages (i.e. Data Status page and Data Trend page) the MQC uses a blue coloring scheme. This means you can easily distinguish between available data in blue and missing data in grey.

Categorical	Description
Coloring
Available	Measure data is available for a certain revision
Default	Measure value was missing, hence filled up with a previously defined default value
Propagated	Measure was missing, but could be propagated from previous revision
Missing	Measure data is missing for a certain revision

Gradient	Description
Coloring
	100% data available	A gradient coloring is mainly used for certain elements that have an aggregated availability value assigned (e.g. projects and artifacts)
	0% data available