Digging deeper into analysis results

If you want to understand the scale used for a particular indicator, to see for example how close you are to moving up the rating scale, you can check the scale used for this indicator in the Indicators tab of the dashboard.

Log in and search for the artefact DB5_backup.c in the Neptune project, where the indicator Maintainability Non-Conformity is rated E. While this tells you about the current rating for this artefact, this does not tell you how to improve it. In order to learn how to improve this score, let’s first take a look at the scale used for this indicator. Click the Indicators tab of the Explorer. The table of indicators opens, as shown below:

The table lists all the indicators available for the artefact over several pages. The scale and levels available for an indicator can be viewed in a tooltip by placing your mouse over the information icon. Using the "NAME" filter, look for the entry named Maintainability Non-Conformity, then click on its value or on the chart icon next to it. The scale for the indicator indicates that the artefact is rated E because the value of the indicator is 472.09. In order to improve the score, the value would need to decrease to under 250 to be rated D, as shown below:

To understand how to improve the rating, you need to know how the indicator’s value is computed. Clicking the indicator name in the Indicator Tree shows the following explanation in the indicator popup:

The computation, i.e. the formula used to calculate the rating is 1000*(WEIGHTED_NC_MAI/ELOC), meaning that the indicator computes a ratio of broken Maintainability rules. To find out what these rules are, click the Findings tab.

Squore displays all the findings for a particular artefact in a table in the Findings tab. Next to the finding’s label is a number of occurrences followed by a colour-coded delta value (red for more occurrences, green for less) compared to a previous analysis.

If you want to find out which rules are taken into account by the Maintainability Non-Conformity indicator, select Maintainability in the ISO CHARACTERISTIC filter to see the corresponding rules, as shown in the picture below:

The rules BWGOTO, STDIO, NOGOTO, RETURN and COMPOUNDIF are the rules that should be fixed in order to improve the Maintainability rating of DB5_backup.c.

You can expand the BWGOTO rule to show each occurrence of the rule being broken, and also review the location in the source code that breaks the rule, as shown below:

Finally, clicking on the line number for each rule-breaking occurrence opens the source code viewer in full screen, so you can carry out your code review:

The source code viewer allows comparing the code against another version of the code. Select a version name in the Compare with: list to switch to diff mode, as shown below:

Analysing findings helps to improve the quality of the code in your project. There is much more you can do with the Findings tab by using the built-in filters to detect regressions and improvements:

You can click the Export button at the top of the list of findings, to generate a CSV file of the findings displayed in the user interface. The contents of the file reflect your current filter selections on the page. The following is a CSV export for the Findings of the Earth project.

If you have doubts about the measures computed by Squore and their meaning, they can usually be solved by looking at the Measures tab of the Explorer.

The content of the measures tab always reflects the data for the current artefact. It is organised in a table displaying the measure’s name, value and other useful information for the current selection, as shown below:

The table also tells you which Data Provider reported the metric with the Provided by column.

Possible values for the measure’s status are: