5.6. Annotations

MQC allows you to annotate the quality of the quality properties and artifacts in your project. This functionality will enable you to add a description to justify the observed quality for the duration of your project. This description/comment lets other users know why a specific quality property is performing poorly. In this way, the justification is documented more transparently.

MQC objectively calculates the quality of your project. This can be configured in Quality Model, Project Structure, Target Values, and Context Categories, etc.

You could use annotations to document deviations from expected values for special, real-world cases. Additionally, you can use annotations to change the quality value or bin if they need to be treated differently than the one calculated.

Annotations should be used to justify very specific and local deviations, especially if such a deviation applies to a specific point in time only. Particularly, annotations should not be used to cover one of the following cases.

  • If you don’t expect any data measure and don’t want MQC to calculate quality for a particular artifact respectively model, this artifact should be excluded from the project using a proper Project Structure configuration (see Artifact Structures).

  • If you don’t want to track a certain quality for a particular artifact, you should use context categories to exclude the underlying data for that particular artifact (see Context Categories). If data is excluded for an artifact, also the quality resulting out of this data will not be calculated for that artifact.

  • If the measured data values, that are loaded into MQC, objectively imply a certain quality, but the resulting quality value shown in MQC does not reflect that, the corresponding quality measurement function should be adapted accordingly (see Quality Properties).

  • Define targets for quality values (see Target Values) rather than using annotations as justification. By using targets, you may specify that the relative quality is 100% if the configured target was reached or even exceeded, even if the calculated absolute quality does not reflect that at all, but meets the expectations for that point in time.

MQC displays applied annotations:

  • as an “A”-Indicator inside the quality matrix (cells with annotated quality show an “A” in addition)

  • as an “A”-Indicator inside the Heatmap (cells with annotated quality show an “A” in addition)

  • within the Tooltip for an annotated quality point (title, description and the change of quality, if defined, will be displayed)

  • in the KPIs (the KPI value shows the annotated quality, the comparative value shows the “Non-Annotated Quality”).

The possibility to add annotation source(s) allows you to import annotations that are not fitting to your project. These annotations are considered unmatched and are displayed.

After loading, you can edit these unmatched annotations to make them applicable to your current project (see Annotations).