Reviewing Artefacts

Relaxing and excluding artefacts

In this section, you will learn how to relax or exclude entire artefacts directly from the Artefact Tree instead of relaxing findings. Relaxing artefacts ensures that their metrics do not impact the rating of the project, however, Data Providers will still generate findings for the relaxed artefacts. Excluding artefacts hides them from the project, and findings and action items are no longer created for them.

This example uses the Earth project from the samples folder. Ensure that you are a Project Manager in this project, or are part of a project role with the View Drafts of Projects and Modify Artefacts privileges before you begin.

Expand the Project Portfolios to show all the versions of Earth. The last two versions in the tree (from top to bottom):

V7 is a version that was analyzed as a draft so that you can edit form values, relax, exclude or add artefacts in preparation for the next analysis, as described in Working With Draft and Baseline Versions
V6 is the latest baseline version, whose results were computed during the analysis and cannot be changed.

Click on Earth > V7 to see the artefacts in the Earth project as created by the demo script:

Figure 1. The artefacts in the V7 version of the Earth project and their rating

To relax an artefact and therefore tell Squore that its rating should not impact the rest of the project, display the menu for this artefact. The relaxation options appear at the bottom of the menu if they are available for your model, as shown below:

Figure 2. The artefact menu

There are two actions that can be taken to relax an artefact:

Relax… allows simply marking an artefact as relaxed, leaves it in the tree in a way that will not impact the overall rating of the project.
Exclude… also relaxes the artefact but then removes it from the Artefact Tree so it will not be visible anymore in future analyses.

In both cases, the relaxation action is only made on a draft version and can be reversed by selecting the Un-relax… entry in the menu or the Clear unapplied changes option in the project portfolio.

Clicking Relax… or Exclude… brings up the sidebar details panel where you can change the artefact status and type a comment to explain the reason for the relaxation. Let’s relax machine.c so it stops impacting the overall project rating. Click the Relax… option in the menu to display the sidebar details and enter a relaxation comment:

Figure 3. The relaxation justification

Click Confirm to save your comment, and notice how the Artefact Tree is updated to reflect the finding’s status:

Figure 4. The relaxed machine.c in the Artefact Tree

Other users can review the justification for the relaxation by clicking on the See details item in the artefact menu:

Figure 5. The log of changes for the artefact machine.c

If you keep relaxing artefacts in this project and create a new draft build of the project, then you will end up seeing changes in the overall rating,

When you relax an artefact, the action items and findings relevant to this artefact are hidden, except when you specifically click on the relaxed artefact. If you want to show them, you can create a filter that includes relaxed artefacts by checking the boxes with the appropriate status in the Filter Panel:

Figure 6. The artefact statuses shown by default in the Artefact Tree

Excluded artefacts can be shown or hidden by clicking the View Excluded Artefacts option in the Artefact Tree menu

Figure 7. The View Excluded Artefacts option in the Artefact Tree menu

Adding and removing artefacts manually

While you review results and comments, you can add artefacts manually to your project as needed. To add an artefact, make sure you are on the Current version of the project and click the node to which you want to add a child artefact. If this node supports adding artefacts, the Add an Artefact option will be available in the menu:

Figure 8. The artefact menu with the Add an Artefact option highlighted

Click the menu and choose an artefact type and an artefact name to add the artefact to the tree.

The type of artefact you can add depends on the model you are using. The model also defines where in the tree the new artefacts can be added.

Here is what the Artefact Tree looks like after manually building a test plan tree:

Figure 9. The artefact tree with manual artefacts not yet rated

When you run a new analysis of the project, the new artefacts will get rated according to what is defined in your model.

Artefacts that were added manually can also be deleted from the tree. Note that artefact edition is tied to a permission in a user’s project role within a project. To learn more about project roles, Project Roles.