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Analyze Your Project With Dashboards

The Dashboard window offers a centralized location where you can open dashboards for software units and components in your project, view metric results, analyze affected artifacts, and generate reports on the quality and compliance of the artifacts in your project.

Open a New Dashboard

To open a dashboard, use the Dashboards gallery in the Add Dashboard section of the toolstrip to select a type of dashboard:

Add Dashboard section of the toolstrip showing buttons for each dashboard

By default, a new dashboard tab opens for the first available unit or component in the Project panel. If a dashboard is not available for a specific unit or component, the name of the unit or component appears dimmed in the Project panel. Click the name of a unit or component that is not dimmed to view the dashboard results for that specific unit or component.

View Help for Metric Information

The dashboards use widgets to display the metric results. When you point to a widget, three dots appears in the top-right corner of the widget.

Cursor pointing to three dot icon

Point to the three dots and click the Help icon to view more information about the metric and how the dashboard calculates the metric value.

Cursor pointing to the Help icon for a widget

Navigate the Dashboard Window

The Dashboard window contains multiple sections:

  • Project panel

    The Project panel shows the architecture of the software units and components in the current project. A unit is a functional entity in your software architecture that you can execute and test independently or as part of larger system tests. A component is an entity that integrates multiple testable units together. In the Dashboard window, the unit dashboard icon indicates a unit and the component dashboard icon indicates a component. Click the three dots to the right of each unit or component to view more information about that unit or component. By default, the dashboard considers a model to be a unit if it does not reference other models. For information on how to specify which entities the Project panel identifies as units and components, see Specify Models as Components and Units.

    Project pane with several units and components

  • Artifacts panel

    Use the Artifacts panel to view the Functional Requirements, Design, Tests, and Test Results folders, which contain the artifacts the dashboard traced to the current unit or component selected in the Project panel. For example, the Design folder for a unit might show the data dictionary, model, and subsystem references associated with the unit. The Artifacts panel uses a digital thread of project information to capture and track information about the artifacts in your project and the relationship between artifacts. Click the three dots to the right of each folder or artifact to view more information.

    Artifacts panel showing design artifacts for the unit cc_ControlMode

  • Dashboard toolstrip

    • Use the Project section of the toolstrip to open a project, specify how the dashboard identifies units and components, and change the layout that the dashboard uses. You can click the Legend button to view a list of the icons for artifacts that the dashboard traces.

    • Use the Traceability section of the toolstrip to explore traceability relationships and to troubleshoot artifact issues in the project. Click Trace View to open an interactive diagram that shows traceability information for artifacts in the project. Click Artifact Issues to troubleshoot warnings and errors associated with project artifacts. For more information, see Explore Traceability Information for Units and Components.

    • Use the Add Dashboard section to select a type of dashboard to open.

    • The Metrics section shows the options for tracing artifacts and collecting metric results. By default, the dashboards automatically trace the artifacts in your project and collect metrics when you initially select a dashboard. However, you can use the Metrics section if you need to manually trace artifacts, manually collect metric results, collect metric results for each of the units and components in the project, or turn off the automatic tracing and collecting settings.

    • The Overlays section shows which types of overlays are enabled. The dashboard uses overlays to show if the metric results are compliant with the metric thresholds, non-compliant with the metric thresholds, generate a warning, or are uncategorized because there are no metric thresholds specified. By default, the dashboard starts with the Compliant, Non-Compliant, and Warning buttons selected. To turn an overlay on or off, click the button for the overlay to select or de-select the overlay.

    • In the Results section, click the Report button to specify the report settings and to generate a report of metric results.

    Dashboard toolstrip with Project, Traceability, Add Dashboard, Metrics, Overlays, and Results sections

See Also

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