What is MQC?
MES Quality Commander® is a monitoring and management tool for the comprehensive quality assessment of model-based software development. User-friendly visualizations, evaluations, and data capturing assist the user to assess the current quality of artifacts and provide a status overview of the overall project quality. In addition, MQC shows the quality trend, which provides information about the progress of the project. MQC can be seamlessly integrated into any development environment or Continuous Integration.
Highlights in latest versions of MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.7.1
Multiple Sets of Milestones
Different stages of large projects often require many milestones which now can be defined as multiple sets in the project structure. Milestone sets can be grouped on different levels, allowing for a clearer overview and more focused visualizations.
Flexible Adapter Configuration
Many tool reports support the flexible configuration of content, meaning that the location and presentation of the same information may vary across different projects. To facilitate the seamless import of reports, tool adapters now support the configuration of alternative locations of ReportDateTime, ArtifactName/Path or MeasurementName.
Highlights of MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.7.0
Configurable Layout for Quality and Data Pages
The revised quality and data pages now allow for multiple visualizations, such as heat map and trend charts, to be arranged and saved in different layouts. Users can arrange visualizations as desired, they can be minimized to a sidebar or maximized to full page to adjust the focus. The custom page layout can be saved.
Time Range Selection
Users can select the time range for trend charts, with options such as week or month, as well as custom time ranges.
Updated MQC Menu
The MQC menu has been tailored to accommodate different user roles.
Highlights of MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.6.3
Accelerated Data Import from GIT Repositories Using the Sparse Checkout
MQC now supports GIT’s sparse checkout allowing the user to filter only relevant files and directories to be downloaded from the remote source.
Along with this, the time filter for commits has been further improved, allowing the independent selection of start and end dates to align with the project milestone configuration.
Validating a Setup Configuration in the Create Project Dialog
When creating a project in MQC, a setup configuration can be loaded upfront. The setup is checked for misconfigurations, tips are provided to correct them.
Dark Mode Option Available for the Whole Interface
The new dark mode provides an additional option for users to enhance readability based on preference.
Highlights in MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.6.2
Automatic Data Background Update of Projects
MQC projects stored within the MQC server library are updated periodically to fetch the latest data changes. Background server-side updates are only executed if new or changed data was detected. This ensures that all projects are always kept up to date.
Bin Distribution Visualization includes Milestones and Overall Quality/Availability
Milestones used as additional time markers to structure projects are now visualized more clearly. The view of all revisions can be condensed to just milestones, showing only the respective last revision of each milestone.
As part of the bin distribution visualization the new view shows the overall quality or availability as an additional trend line.
Highlights in MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.6.1
Artifacts and Quality in flexible structures
Typical development projects are often structured in various ways, i.e. by product architectures, by product platforms, even by roles & responsibilities, therefore the artifact and quality model structures in MQC now support multiple flexible levels and freely configurable naming. Appropriate filtering and marking now allow you to focus on many specific aspects of artifacts or quality properties, in addition to a general overview.
Selectable scope for visual quality assessment
The scope of quality assessment that is shown in different visualizations includes all quality properties by default (=absolute quality). However, it is now possible to adjust that scope by e.g. ignoring all missing quality properties (=available quality) or by adapting the assessment in relation to defined target values (=relative quality).
Highlights in MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.6.0
Multiple Quality Models
It is now possible to configure the overall quality model out of multiple smaller ones, e.g. when each data source is defined in its own quality model. MQC provides initial quality models for each data source that can be applied e.g. when a data source is not defined in another overall quality model.
Faster File Import and Data Transformations
The file import now only loads new data, while improvements in the internal data flow and memory consumptions lead to significantly shorter data transformation and calculation times. The adapter framework has been modified to reduce complexity and reacts faster now as well.
Highlights in MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.5.3
Project Creation Wizard
When creating a new project you only need to specify the location of your data (source) and the revision granularity in the dialog. The project will then be set up automatically including the import of data, which significantly reduces the set up time.
Multiple Git Repositories as one Data Source
Configure one data source for a multiple number of similarly structured Git repositories containing your data. This can reduce your configuration effort considerably, as you will only need one Git configuration (branches, commits, time range, etc.) for a list of similar Git repositories.
Highlights in MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.5.2
- Aggregation of artifact structure levels keeps the overview manageable even in very large projects. All visualizations can be adapted according to the selected structural level.
- Sorting and searching were added to the KPI visualizations for Artifacts, Quality Properties, and Measures.
- Improvements to tool adapters and Git connection for enhanced performance.
Highlights in MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.5.1
Annotations for Quality Properties
Use annotations to justify and adapt quality values directly in the project. Annotations can change either the quality bin or the quality value of a quality property measure. A validity time frame can be applied.
Highlights in MES Quality Commander® (MQC) v.5.0
MQC supports GIT as a source of data. Custom filter options can be used to preselect relevant data.
Differences in the quality and availability of data between revisions are calculated and shown in the new “Diff” view.
Quality bins are user-configurable in name, number, thresholds, and color-scheme for convenient adaptation.
Installation
MQC Editor:
- Extract the MQC zip file into a target folder with write access.
- Navigate to the MES_MQC_SpotfireAnalyst11-4-2_single_user_win\Products\TIBCO Spotfire Installer directory
- Execute the setup file (.exe)
- Follow the installation instructions provided by the MQC User Guide.
License Configuration
Learn more about the MES Quality Tools License Configuration, general license questions and the MES licensing models as well as how to change your MAC-ID.
Update to the Latest Version
MQC Editor:
- On startup choose to login to the MQC Server instead of working offline.
- In case of available updates, you will be automatically prompted to update.
- Confirming the update will install the latest version of MQC.
For further information, please, check the installation instructions provided by the MQC User Guide.
System Requirements
The following system requirements must be in place to use MQC:
MQC Editor:
- Windows (7 + 8, 8.1 + 10 - 64-bit versions)
- Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6 (or higher)
- Microsoft Office 2010 (or higher)
Read more about detailed hardware requirements in the MQC User Guide.
Quick Start
The MQC User Guide includes a Quick Start Guide, which gives you an introduction into the functionality of the MES Quality Commander®. It shows you how to use MQC to analyse your project quality and data. You are guided in detail and will learn how to:
- Open the sample project shipped with MQC
- Work with MQC by navigating through the different pages
- Check the availability of the loaded data
- Check the status of project KPIs and quality
- Identify root causes of insufficient quality
Suggestions
If you have any suggestions to help us improve the MES Quality Commander® (MQC), please do not hesitate to contact us:
Email: mqc@model-engineers.com
User Instruction
User Guide
The MQC User Guide presents clear instructions on how to work with the MES Quality Commander® (MQC). It provides users with information about getting started and working with MQC.
You can easily call the User Guide (PDF format) by clicking on “Help” > “User Guide for MES Quality Commander” in the menu.
Additionally, by clicking on any of the “Help” icons within the tool you will be directly lead into specific chapters resp. sections of the User Guide (HTML format) (see image).
MQC Related Videos
MES Webinar Series
Find all upcoming webinars. Participation in our webinars is of course free of charge. Webinars are held in English (unless otherwise stated).
Release Notes - MQC v.7.1 (June 2023)
Multiple Sets of Milestones
- Different areas of large projects often require many milestones which now can be defined as multiple sets in the project structure. Milestone sets can be grouped on different levels, allowing for a clearer overview and more focused visualizations.
- Each set of milestones is a consecutive list of dates. Milestones from different sets can overlap or even have the same date.
- The various milestone sets can be organized in a tree structure to simplify the navigation of numerous sets and to quickly enable or disable them.
- The toolbar allows the selection of all, one or more sets, or individual milestones. The selected milestones are displayed in the trend visualization. If more than one milestones is visible between two revision, only one line is shown. A tooltip gives detailed information about all milestones at that date.
General Adapter Options for All Adapters
Many tool reports support the flexible configuration of content, meaning that the location and presentation of the same information may vary across different projects.
- To facilitate the seamless import of reports, tool adapters support the configuration of FilePath based Adapter Options for the ReportDateTime, ArtifactPath, DataSourceName and MeasurementName.
The values for these fields can be extracted from the report file path with regex expressions.
- The TPT xml tool adapter additionally supports the configuration of a MeasureNameMapping and MeasurementNameFromXml.
The MeasureNameMapping allows you to map MeasureNames from the xml to your Quality Model.
The MeasurementNameFromXml allows you to define xml paths and matching conditions to read the MeasurementName from a text or attribute of an element in the xml.
User Preferences for Display Options
When reopening a project from the library, the user’s previously chosen display options are applied in the background and the project adopts the same state of display options as before.
MQC now automatically saves these options per user and per project on the server.
Extended MXAM Tool Adapter: Support for Compressed MXMR Files
With MXAM v9.1, MXMR report files may be provided as zip archives.
MQC can detect this and imports data from zipped reports without the need for the user to uncompress the archives beforehand.
This also applies when opening compressed MXMR reports to view the data origins.
Tool Adapter for JUnit, DotCover and CodeClimate
- The XML report in the JUnit format is supported.
The adapter reads all testcases and counts total, failures, errors and skipped tests as measures. The classname is used for the ArtifactPath while the timestamp is used to read the report datetime.
- The XML report of dotCover by JetBrains is supported.
The Adapter reads all types within every namespace and takes the CoveragePercent as the measure. The namespace and type combination is used for the ArtifactPath.
- The JSON report in the CodeClimat format is supported. This format is the default code quality format for GitLab.
The Adapter reads all issues and counts the severities as measures. The filePath of the issue is used for the ArtifactPath.
Additional Visualization Options for Heatmap, Sunburst and Trend
New display options are available for the Heatmap, Sunburst and Trend visualizations.
Heatmap:
- Weights
By enabling weights the columns and rows of the heatmaps are sized according to the defined artifact weights and quality property weights. If the option is disabled, all columns and rows are shown in the same size. The quality calculation does not change based on this option.
- Scrolling
When there are numerous artifacts, scrolling can be enabled to activate a vertical scrollbar. If the option is disabled, the visualization is condensed to fit within the available space.
- Labels
The visibility of the labels can be changed with this option.
Sunburst:
- Interaction
Should a click go into more details (Drilldown) or should it mark the items.
- Labels
The visibility of the labels can be changed with this option.
- Values
Visiblity of the values inside the colored areas.
Trend:
- Date Group
Revisions can be grouped by Weeks, Months, Quarters or Years. The revisions can be collapsed or focused on based on these groupings.
Improved Visualization Performance for Huge Projects
The status and trend visualizations render faster and are more responsive.
This was achieved by adding a unique id-column to the database tables and using these ids instead of relying on generating ids in JavaScript.
The performance of the heatmap was further improved by using an index instead of nested loops in the rendering process.
The trend visualization’s rendering time has been significantly reduced as a result of the earlier preprocessing of relevant visible data.
The creation of a filter-index instead of re-querying from the database has accelerated the application of the revision marking and data range selection.
User Experience
- Revision indicator added for all trend visualizations.
- Measure indicator added for Measures KPI on data page.
- Legend items in Trend are grouped by Measures (incl Measurement) and Artifacts.
- Diff colors in dark mode were adjusted to be more saturated.
- The file browser in MQC is faster for network paths, by optimizing the used WMI query with specific fields and a scope. If the request is unresponsive, the query is cancelled by a timeout.
- Cloning Git repositories, without sparse, was improved for huge repositories. The cloning progress is indicated and issues regarding timeout, long file paths, and NTFS were resolved.