Standardization Quality Assessment (SQA) reports

To assess the results of your standardization process and verify that the results meet your data quality objectives, you can use a Standardization Quality Assessment (SQA) stage.

The SQA stage processes records that have been processed through the Standardize stage. The SQA stage gathers data about the standardization process which you use to create SQA reports. You create SQA reports in the IBM® InfoSphere® Information Server Web console.

The SQA reports provide an executive summary of the standardization results. You can send the reports to team members and stakeholders who do not have direct access to the standardization job results, or access to the IBM InfoSphere DataStage® and QualityStage® Designer (where you generate data for the reports).

Use the reports as part of an ongoing quality control of production processes, or as part of standardization rule set development or modification. For example a technical member of the data quality team configures a standardization job, produces output, and then needs to share the results with a subject matter expert. The subject matter expert has the domain knowledge needed to determine the success of the standardization results. The technical person can send SQA reports to the subject matter expert for feedback and signoff.

SQA reports are intended to be viewed in pairs. The high-level report and low-level report complement each other, although each type of report is generated separately:
Standardization Quality Assessment (SQA) report
Provides statistics about the standardization process, such as how much data remains unstandardized. You can produce this report as an HTML file, a PDF file, or an RTF file. For the most accurate rendering of graphics in the report, view the RTF file with Microsoft Word or Microsoft Word Viewer.
Standardization Quality Assessment (SQA) Record Examples report
Provides examples of processed records. You can produce this report only as a Microsoft Excel (.xls) file.
  1. Adding the SQA stage
    To generate data for the Standardization Quality Assessment (SQA) reports, add the SQA stage to a job that processes output from the Standardize stage. Optionally, you can add the SQA stage directly to a Standardize stage job.
  2. Configuring the Standardize stage to generate SQA report columns
    After you add the SQA stage to a job, you must configure the Standardize stage to generate additional columns that are used to create SQA reports.
  3. Configuring the SQA stage
    When you configure the Standardization Quality Assessment (SQA) stage, you select a column from the output of the stage that contains the output of the standardization job. The SQA stage generates data from that column which the Web console uses to generate reports.
  4. Creating SQA reports
    After a standardization job is created, you can create a Standardization Quality Assessment (SQA) report to review example results from the Standardize stage.
  5. Running SQA reports
    After a report is created, you run the report. You cannot view example results from the Standardize stage until you run the report.
  6. How to interpret the SQA reports
    When you review Standardization Quality Assessment (SQA) reports, look at the data from the perspective of what is and what is not processed by your job with the Standardize stage.
Parent topic: Making data consistent through standardization
Previous topic: Configuring the Standardize stage
Related concepts:
Analyzing source data
Related tasks:
Setting up application servers to run SQA or investigation reports