# How it Works

## How the Evaluation works

The Evaluation is comprised of configurable features and requirements tables, scores (and rankings) for products, and a collaborative text editor experience to help you whittle down requirements and features, and various types of blocks to show the data.

### Product Scores

All products are rated on all Requirements, Dimensions, and Features.

{% hint style="info" %}
Features are the components that make up Requirements and Dimensions. For example, a Requirement like "Must integrate with our current stack" could include Okta integration and PagerDuty integration as features, and any number of individual Features can map one-to-many to Dimensions.
{% endhint %}

Requirements and Features have 4 possible priority settings:

1. <mark style="background-color:red;">Critical</mark>
2. <mark style="background-color:yellow;">Important</mark>
3. <mark style="background-color:purple;">Nice To Have</mark>
4. <mark style="background-color:blue;">Don't Care</mark>

<figure><img src="/files/RF9WoV2NhXtAG6bC4rVt" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

Products can have the following ratings for Requirements and Features:

1. <mark style="background-color:purple;">Great</mark>
2. <mark style="background-color:green;">Good</mark>
3. <mark style="background-color:yellow;">OK</mark>
4. <mark style="background-color:red;">Poor</mark>
5. <mark style="background-color:blue;">N/A</mark>

The weights assigned to Dimensions (e.g., Integration) also impact the overall product scores.

<figure><img src="/files/ZvWMGzmgVP2TD1yFbbV9" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

### Product Ranking

The product ranking is a simple order of the products based on their score plus using <mark style="background-color:red;">Critical</mark>-rated features as a threshold function. You may get a product ranked higher despite having a lower score due to this.

<figure><img src="/files/yaYAhclM2EL75QeaILIb" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

### Impact

Impact tables and charts are calculated by looking at the standard deviation. You may have 5 features that are <mark style="background-color:red;">Critical</mark> but have every product rated the same, whereas 5 features that are <mark style="background-color:purple;">Nice To Have</mark> could  show a lot of variance between products, in which case the <mark style="background-color:purple;">Nice To Have</mark>'s have more Impact.

<figure><img src="/files/uy4QDlch6C2O6lXYcRKV" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.taloflow.ai/methodology/how-it-works.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.