The Unit Groups feature in Quality Flow gives you the ability to group your units into meaningful subsets. For example, in Text, Audio or Video projects you may want to break up longer files into smaller segments, but still keep the segments in sequence and make sure one person works on them, so they can retain the context.
This article describes how to use the Unit Groups feature.
Data format
To create unit groups, your data upload must contain a column called "_UNIT_GROUP". Group all the units you wish to keep together using unique names, or numbering such as the example below.
For ease of data management, we recommend adding another column, called something like "segment_no" to your upload file which numbers the items in the unit group sequentially. If you do not include this column, quality flow will display the items in the same order as they appear in the upload, however if units are moved around in flows, you may like to have this column to keep track of the original order.
Quality Flow projects will detect the formatting in this example upload file and will create three unit groups with four segments each.
- Note that your whole Project will now be considered "Segmented", and there will be additional Job settings to be aware of, see below.
- Note also that test questions are not supported in Segmented projects.
After the file is uploaded a UNIT GROUPS tab will be visible on the DATASET page, next to the UNITS tab and you will be able to perform certain Actions from this tab.
Rows Settings
In the JOB SETTINGS page for projects with unit groups, under Rows Settings you will see an additional "Unit Group Options" setting. Select "Retain Grouping" to ensure that groups will always be kept together in the job and that each contributor will receive a full group to work on at a time. They will need to complete the entire group as a single task.
Note
- If you choose to Retain Grouping in your Work job, any following QA Job will permanently inherit this setting.
- Set the Assignment Lease Expiry for the length of time you wish to allow for the entire group.
- If you choose to Retain Groupings and Allow Abandon Units, the abandon check box will apply to the whole group.
- If you elect "Ignore Grouping" contributors will receive one unit at a time, as they would in a project without unit groups. This can be useful later in a Project, when you may wish to create other Jobs that do not require to keep whole groups together.
The following screenshot is shows the contributor's view of a unit group assignment. Note they need to save each page, and they can navigate between pages.
Sending Data to Jobs
You can send whole unit groups to jobs via Actions the UNIT GROUPS tab on the DATASET page. Select the unit groups you wish to send and then click "Actions" > "Send Selected Units To A Job".
Alternatively, if you wish to use the filtering features available on the UNITS tab to identify which units or unit groups to send, select you units as usual and click "Actions" >> "Send Selected Units To A Job".
When the "Send to A Job" modal opens you will see some additional options.
- Include All Units In The Same Group - this will help make sure you don't accidentally leave any units out of your selection).
- Include Context - or else you can choose to send just the units you have selected along with a certain number of units before or after those units.
- The choice to only send some surrounding context, in conjunction with "Retain Groupings" may be useful later in a Project when you are doing revisions, for example.