Glossary of terms

Analysis target: The target platform which Project Auditor considers whilst running analysis. This can be important because some Issues may only affect certain platforms, and compiled code may differ per-platform. By default, the analysis target is the same as the current target platform in the Build Settings, but this can be changed to a different supported target platform in the Welcome View or by configuring an AnalysisParams object.

Analyzer: A code class which analyzes a particular aspect of a Unity project and constructs ReportItems representing any Issues which were discovered. Project Auditor contains analyzers for each supported asset type, for Project Settings, and several analyzers to detect different kinds of issues in C# scripts. Analyzers are typically responsible for declaring and registering relevant Descriptors and DiagnosticParams, and typically implement an Analyze() method to detect and report Issues.

Area: An aspect of a Unity project which may be affected by an Issue. Areas include things like runtime CPU or GPU performance, memory footprints, build sizes, build times or iteration times. Not to be confused with Project Areas, which are broad categories of analysis which can be selected in the Welcome View to specify what kinds of analysis Project Auditor should perform.

Build Report: aka BuildReport. Every time Unity creates a player build, it generates and saves a BuildReport object. When the Project Auditor package is installed and a clean player build is performed, Project Auditor can analyze the BuildReport to display information about all the files that were included in the build, and timing information detailing how long each step of the build process took to execute.

Descriptor: An object which describes a type of issue - a potential problem in your project, along with a potential course of action to address the problem.

DiagnosticParams: The name of a class in the Project Auditor package which is used to store diagnostic parameters - named integer values which can be used by analyzers to decide whether to report an Issue. For example, a parameter which specifies a polygon count, used by the analyzer to report meshes which have a higher polygon count than the threshold. Parameter values can be overridden on selected platforms, and can be viewed and edited in Project Settings > Project Auditor > Diagnostic Params.

Ignore: Because Project Auditor cannot know all of the context behind the things it finds in a project, it can sometimes report Issues that are false positives. For this reason, any reported Issue can be ignored by selecting it in the table and clicking the Ignore button in the right-hand panel. See also: Rules which are how ignored Issues are implemented.

Insight: A report item discovered and reported by Project Auditor which is presented for informational purposes and not specifically actionable. Examples of insights include details about a single asset, a compiler message, or build step. Project Auditor presents filterable, sortable tables of insights as convenient ways to view and investigate some aspect of your project. Insights are reported by Modules.

Issue: A report item discovered and reported by Project Auditor which represents a potential problem in your project, which you may want to take action to address. Examples include calls to Unity APIs that are known to be slow or generate garbage, or suboptimal project settings or asset import settings. Issues are reported by Analyzers.

Report Item: A term to refer to both Insights and Issues. In Project Auditor's code and API, items are represented by ReportItem objects. A ReportItem with a valid DescriptorId is an Issue. One without a valid DescriptorId is an Insight.

Module: One of the static analysis tools provided by Project Auditor. Project Auditor creates and manages several Modules, each of which reports a different category of Insights. Modules may also create and run one or more Analyzers to generate Report Items. For more information on the areas covered by Project Auditor's Modules, see the Configuration documentation.

Project Auditor: A suite of static analysis tools for Unity projects, in a package of the same name. Also, the name of a C# object which is created to actually perform the analysis and to return a Report.

Report: An object which is output from Project Auditor's analysis process. It includes some information about how the analysis was configured, some high-level summary information, and a list of ProjectIssues detailing every issue and insight that was discovered by Project Auditor's analyzers.

Rule: A rule which can be used to change the Severity of an Issue. An individual Rule is characterised as a DescriptorId identifying the general Issue, a filter identifying a specific instance, and a Severity to be applied to matching issues. The Ignore button is implemented by setting the Severity of selected Issues to "None". Rules can be viewed in Project Settings > Project Auditor > Rules and should be included in your project's version control repository.

Severity: An indication of how serious or high-priority an Issue is likely to be.

View: A display shown in the main panel of the Project Auditor window, which shows all of the Items in a particular IssueCategory.

Welcome View: The initial View shown when the Project Auditor is initially opened, or when a report is discarded to create a new one.