In this set of posts I will capture “Best Practices” for QAing the models that you create prior to delivering the results to downstream users. While you will perform a degree of QA on the model while you are building it, the model should go through a final set of checks prior to delivery that will highlight any potential flaws or defects in the finished product.
QA of models falls into two main parts
Qualitative Part
This part focuses on the “Aesthetics” of the model - how it looks and how easy it is to understand for the downstream users. It is very important that your models have a consistent look and feel, and that the same things are always in the same place in the system, are drawn in the same way and use the same Colors, Layers, Linestyles, Lineweights etc. and have the same names. This drives consistency in the look and feel of the model but also in the way that people find and use information that it contains. You can enhance this using defined View Filters for example or defined Selection Sets to make it easy to find and select information that goes together.
In this area you also focus on the look of the data downstream for the field users - selecting colors that you know work on a GCS900 system or Earthworks system is an important factor. Also using colors that clearly represent the features that you are going to build - people on site recognize features through Shape, Color, Layer and Name primarily so being consistent and choosing colors wisely really helps the users.
Annotation of the model is also important - making sure that you put the right information in the model that will assist field users - examples include Alignment Labels, Road Names, Material Thicknesses, Shaded Areas for different materials (SiteVision / Siteworks) and so on.
Quantitative Part
This part focuses on the quality of the data itself, and focuses on things like correct slopes, correct widths, correct elevations, correct surface triangulation, correct fitting of surface model components, surface smoothness and correct contours. For alignments it focuses on correct geometry, correct start and end coordinates and elevations and correct elements of the alignment, as well as checking for deflections in the alignment.
This set of posts will take some time to create, if you have comments, please post them in the Q&A Forum and I will move them into here as necessary.