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Automated Validator Report Reader

Run the Automated Validator Report Reader MicroSim Fullscreen

About This MicroSim

A validator prints findings. It does not decide whether you ship. That decision is a triage judgment, and this MicroSim is where you practice it.

The report holds six findings — three errors and three warnings — against a 15-node graph. Every one of them is genuinely true of the graph on the right: the cycle really is a cycle, the orphan really has no edges, the category really is 5 of 15 concepts. Clicking a finding highlights the exact nodes and edges it refers to.

The judgment

The obvious rule — "errors block, warnings don't" — gets you close but not to the right answer. Three errors are reported, and yet only two block:

Finding Severity Blocks?
DAG-001 Cycle: Prerequisite → Learning Path → Readiness → Prerequisite Error Yes — no valid reading order exists
ORPH-006 Orphan: 'Deployment' has no edges Error Yes — cannot be sequenced into any curriculum
DUP-003 Duplicate label: 'Graph' at IDs 3 and 11 Error — resolved No — merged in the previous repair pass
BAL-002 Category 'Graph Theory' at 33% Warning No
LEAF-004 'Traversal' has no dependents Warning No
DEG-005 'Taxonomy' has out-degree 5 Warning No

So the answer is No, not ready — but for a reason you can only give after reading the findings rather than counting their severity labels. A resolved error stays in the report as a record of what was fixed; it is history, not a blocker.

The warnings are worth arguing about too. BAL-002 flags a 33% category — but against only 15 concepts, that is five nodes. The same 33% across 200 concepts would be a real problem. A warning marks a judgment call, and the judgment is still yours.

How to Use

  1. Click any finding to highlight the node or edge it affects and expand its explanation. The rest of the graph dims so the affected elements stand out.
  2. Toggle Sort by severity to reorder the list errors-first. The report arrives in generation order, which is not triage order.
  3. Once you have reviewed at least one finding, the Ready to publish? prompt unlocks. Write a justification, then answer Yes or No and check your reasoning against the model answer.

Iframe Embed Code

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

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<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/learning-graphs/sims/automated-validator-report-reader/main.html"
        height="562px"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Audience

Instructional designers, curriculum developers, and educational technologists working with concept dependency graphs.

Duration

10–15 minutes

Prerequisites

Learners need Automated Validator, Validation Threshold, Finding Severity, and Quality Metrics Report from Chapter 25, plus cycle and orphan detection from Chapter 5.

Activities

  1. Locate every finding (5 min): Click all six and, for each, name the specific node or edge involved before reading the explanation. A finding you cannot locate on the graph is a finding you cannot act on.
  2. Triage (5 min): Toggle Sort by severity and ask the class to count the blockers. Most will say three. The answer is two — surface DUP-003's resolved state and discuss why a report keeps resolved findings at all.
  3. Argue a warning (5 min): Ask whether BAL-002 should block. It should not, but the interesting discussion is why: at 15 concepts the 30% ceiling has almost no statistical meaning. Thresholds are heuristics, and heuristics need a reader.

Assessment

Learners can:

  • Locate each finding's affected node or edge on the rendered graph.
  • Classify each finding's severity and say whether it blocks publication.
  • Explain why three reported errors produce only two blockers.
  • Justify a publish/no-publish decision by naming the specific unresolved errors.
  • Automated Validator — the tool that produced this report
  • Finding Severity — the error/warning distinction, and its limits
  • Validation Threshold — the 30% ceiling behind BAL-002
  • Graph Quality Score — the composite these findings roll up into
  • Cycle Detection / Orphan Detection — the two checks that produce the blockers here

References

  1. Chapter 25: Graph Validation and Quality Assurance - The chapter this MicroSim supports.
  2. Chapter 5: Graph Quality, Validation, and File Formats - The structural checks that generate these findings.
  3. Directed Acyclic Graph - Why a cycle makes a learning graph unsequenceable.
  4. Software Quality Assurance - The broader discipline this triage workflow borrows from.
  5. vis-network Documentation - The graph rendering library used to build this MicroSim.