> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.iriscode.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Quality Signals

> The handful of things dragging your project down, ranked by density rather than raw count.

A project with 400 findings is not necessarily worse than one with 40. It may simply be larger.

Quality Signals answer a different question from the health score. Rather than "how good is this code", they answer "what should be addressed first", by ranking the recurring problems in a scan by density rather than raw count.

They are **not** a second score. Code Health remains the only headline number.

## Each signal keeps its real units

Converting everything into a single abstract figure would obscure what is actually happening, so nothing is normalised away:

| Signal                                  | Shown as                        |
| --------------------------------------- | ------------------------------- |
| Duplicate code                          | A percentage of your code lines |
| Security smells                         | Findings                        |
| Suppressions                            | Findings                        |
| Type debt (`any`, missing return types) | Findings                        |
| Debug prints                            | Findings                        |
| Complexity spikes                       | Files                           |
| TODO load                               | Findings                        |
| File naming                             | Findings                        |

## Why density rather than totals

Count-based signals are normalised per 1,000 lines of code before ranking. Without that step a large repository would always rank worse than a small one purely on size, which tells you nothing useful.

The **Present**, **Elevated** and **High** labels describe that density. They are not a grade.

Type debt is omitted entirely on projects containing no TypeScript or JavaScript, rather than displayed as zero.

## Using the panel

Expand **Quality Signals** in the Workspace or Folder view for the ranked list, then select a signal to open the findings behind it.

From the terminal, `iris check <directory>` prints the top three with their real values. Single-file checks do not print them, since one file does not constitute a distribution.

## There is no Quality Signals gate

Quality Signals cannot fail a build. Enforcement uses explicit named limits instead: `gateMaxDuplicateBlocks`, `gateMaxSecuritySmells`, `gateMaxSuppressions` and `gateMaxNamingViolations`.

This is deliberate. When a gate fails it should name the specific standard that was exceeded and by how much, rather than reporting that a blended metric moved. A composite score gives no indication of what to change.