Audits and results

How do I read the Quality score trend in the audit history?

The project's History view: the Quality score trend chart, deltas between scans, access to archived reports - and how to interpret trend shapes (growth, drop, sawtooth).

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A single audit tells you how things are; the history tells you where you're heading. The project's History view gathers all audits and draws a trend from them - the shortest path to answering "is the analytics work paying off".

What you'll find in the History view

The Quality score trend chart - scores of consecutive audits from oldest to newest (the last 12 by default; expandable to all),
a list of all scans with date, score, checkpoint balance (passing / warnings / errors) and the delta - the score change versus the previous audit,
access to every archived report - opened in full form, exactly as it looked on the day of the examination,
archive management: individual reports can be permanently deleted (How do I delete a report from history?).

How to interpret the trend shapes

Steady growth - the fix cycle is working. Note which implementation batches produced the biggest jumps: that's knowledge about what weighs most in your case.

A sudden drop - almost always a regression after a site or configuration change. Open the report with the drop and compare it with the previous one: the new errors point to the culprit. The date of the drop is your best clue ("what did we deploy that week?").

A flat chart at a high level - the desired state; rescans act as monitoring.

A sawtooth (up-down-up) - a signal that fixes aren't durable: they vanish with subsequent deployments. Time to move the findings into the development team's documentation (e.g. a release checklist) instead of fixing the same thing a third time.

Practical uses of the history

Holding contractors accountable - the report before and after an implementation is an objective acceptance protocol for analytics work.
Reporting to management / a client - the trend on a single chart communicates the effect of the work better than a table of checkpoints.
Backward diagnostics - "since when has purchase been broken?" - scroll the history and find the first report with the error.

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