Reviewing Artifacts

Relaxing and excluding artifacts

In this section, you will learn how to relax or exclude entire artifacts directly from the Artifact Tree instead of relaxing findings. Relaxing artifacts ensures that their metrics do not impact the rating of the project, however, Data Providers will still generate findings for the relaxed artifacts. Excluding artifacts 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 Artifacts 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 artifacts 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 artifacts in the Earth project as created by the demo script:

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

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

Figure 2. The artifact menu

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

Relax… allows simply marking an artifact as relaxed, leaves it in the tree in a way that will not impact the overall rating of the project.
Exclude… also relaxes the artifact but then removes it from the Artifact 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 artifact 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 Artifact Tree is updated to reflect the finding’s status:

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

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

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

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

Figure 6. The artifact statuses shown by default in the Artifact Tree

Excluded artifacts can be shown or hidden by clicking the View Excluded Artifacts option in the Artifact Tree menu

Figure 7. The View Excluded Artifacts option in the Artifact Tree menu

Adding and removing artifacts manually

Please note that the features described in this section are scheduled for removal and will no longer be supported starting from the next major release.

For more details, please refer to the release notes or contact Vector Informatik GmbH support at support@vector.com.

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

Figure 8. The artifact menu with the Add an Artifact option highlighted

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

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

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

Figure 9. The artifact tree with manual artifacts not yet rated

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

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