News

July 7 – July 13, 2018

Work Complete

Appreview

• (Fixed) Needs Advisor list was not displaying the newly selected advisor on the table view after user submitted form.

Courses

• (Fixed) Edge case where the instructor summary (shown on offering list table views) was not updating correctly.

Hiring Database

Hiring database 95% ready for release. We continue to push toward the finish line. We had another instructive group exercise of the system that helped clarify our path toward release. Here's what has been updated in the last two weeks.

• Major review of authorization levels. Many user actions were prototyped with open authorization. Review various actions (e.g. cancel a request, approve on behalf) and implement authorization tests.
• Appointment requests are locked from editing when they are "Entered in Workday" or canceled.
• Approval records now store date when a notification was sent. System will not send multiple email notifications about the same Approval.
• Approve / Sent Back options changed from big buttons to checkbox options. The buttons confused the interface, it seemed like pressing them should commit the approval.
• Approval option on HR form updated for Approve / Sent Back options. Currently this form stores the HR Review input then routes the user to Approval form.
• If a note is edited after it is intially posted system shows the edit and who changed it.
• Fixed placeholder values on specific Worker page. Now shows current & upcoming appointment requests and has second table for historical appointment requests.
• Implemented Approver role. This is base read-only role that can respond to Approvals asked of them. When an authorized user adds an Approval Request, if the requested Approver is not a current Hiring database user and they are a current user of another college database (Student, Appreview, Budget, etc) they are automatically added as user to Hiring Database.
• Fixed position form, supervisor input. It now properly keeps selected supervisor value after that text input loses focus.
• Authorization log added. This records when users are added (by a admin user or via Approval) or authorization changed.
• Email notification for Needs HR Approval. This email is sent to an email address configured in system settings.
• Fixed adding new approval with no approver selected errored out, now has proper form validation.
• Seach page has help text for the hiring database.

Person

• (Fixed) Removed references to the old student database STEP.

Infrastructure

• (In Testing) Upgraded the EDUC project to Laravel 5.6.

6/18/2018 – 6/29/2018

Work Complete

Hiring

The new Hiring database looks about 90% ready for release. The last major features (email, search, respond on behalf) were implemented this cycle and I am working through refinement and bugs.

• Search is implemented. Search is accessible from any page by clicking magnifying glass icon. Search tool does keyword search for Workers, Budgets, and Courses.
• Email notification system implemented. An email notification is sent to a user when they are asked for approval on an appointment request. Original submitter gets an email notification if their appointment request is "Sent Back". (Currently on test server email messages are being routed through a test environment so we don't spam actual people. Ask Paul if you'd like to review the email messages.)
• Users with the correct permissions may respond on behalf of the original responder requested in an approval. For example if an Approval was requested from Albert, but he is not available, Beth (who has the HR role) could enter a response, the Approval record would then be displayed as "Beth Approved on behalf of Albert".
• Stages page shows an overview of the implemented approval workflow in Hiring database along with a count of appointment requests currently at each stage. Clicking the stage allows a user to see all requests in that stage (example: all requests that Need HR Approval).
• (Fixed) Course suggestion tool was not finding EDC&I courses.
• Added down arrow icon to the "Needs Your Attention" banner to better direct user's attention.
• Added ability to edit worker contact information. Changes to a Worker record are logged, but worker log not yet visible in web UI.
• Added ability to pick a new worker for the appointment request. Changed Worker is logged in Appointment log.
• The new Hours & Pay tool is now used for the initial appointment period as well as for added periods and edits.
• Worker suggestor now suggests from both known COE people (college staff, students) and from previously created Worker records.
• Reworked date synchronization. An appointment request has Hours & Pay periods which have dates, Courses which have dates, and Budgets which have dates. Previously if a user created Hours & Pay period, then added budgets, then changed Hours & Pay periods dates would get out of sync. New system has more robust date synchronization and responds well regardless of what order child records are added or changed.
• (Fixed) Position form has the filter questions Student? and Course? correctly populated when a Position Type is already selected.
• Authorization is checked for editing notes. Notes on an appointment request can be edited by the user who created them or by users with Admin role in the system.
• (Fixed) Person suggestion tool was returning partial person records from other college databases. Now, in the hiring database, it will only suggest persons with UW NetID and who have current authorization in one or more college databases.

Student

• Nightly student update modified to detect students coming in to COE majors as early as possible. UW data generates student's registration records for a given quarter some time before creating student's major records. In order to get current COE students as soon as they register and new COE students as soon as their new Major is recorded we need to use multiple update strategies.

June 4 – June 15, 2018

Work Complete

Courses

• (Feature complete) Course number filter (400 level or below, 500 level or above) is now a standard filter available on most reports in the system.
• (Fixed) Resolved starting edit on multiple rows in hiring report could update wrong record.
• (Fixed) Hiring report filters out canceled sections, canceled bug is displayed on report.

Hiring

85% toward initial production launch. We continue to make progress on the new Hiring database. As more users are testing the system we've added pre-launch requirements. We are planning a hands on, group demo and exercise in the coming week.

• Reworked approvals for "Sent Back". Previously we had "Deny" and "Don't Respond" options on approvals, but didn't have a workflow for dealing with those, those responses have been removed. Approvers now have the option to "Send Back" an approval request. This pushes responsibility for responding to the "Sent Back" addressee, generally the original requester.
• Reworked "Hours & Pay" input to be more dynamic allowing user to view table of Hours & Pay periods and to edit that table within a single view. Hours & Pay tool is added to the HR Review form. Hours & Pay overall tool includes Add Note form.
• Reworked Position form and Worker Status form. Put these fields into better order. Moved worker status (new hire, rehire, current) to the Position form, which leaves only student related fields on "Worker Status" so renamed this form and views to "Student Status". Fixed using back-button to Position form created additional requests.
• Added Special Pay Earn Type fields to HR Review.
• An appointment request can be canceled. Canceled banner appears at top of canceled request.
• Corrected one-time fee amount field missing.
• Changed "Done" buttons on course, periods, budgets edit tools to "Continue".
• Moved "Submit" button to the bottom of the appointment request detail page. When the appointment request still needs to be submitted for department approval there is also a banner at the top indicating action is needed.
• Added banner for "Needs Your Response" when the current user has been asked for approval on current appointment request.
• Restyled "Respond" buttons in Approvals section so they are more visible.
• Changed salary fields to "Full Time Monthly Rate", "FTE", and "Actual Monthly Rate".
• Added system Settings that can be edited by authorized users through web UI. Initial settings for default hourly pay rate and budget biennium.
• Approvals generated by budgets are requested of the specific fiscal manage contact from the budgets database.

May 21, 2018 through June 1, 2018

Work Complete

Budgets

• (Feature complete) Include COE Summer academic org code to budget query. Our local budget tracking database pulls COE budgets from UW institutional data based on UW Organizational Codes. We were missing 3 budgets that UW organizes under a central Org Code for State/Seattle-Campus courses (TEP) offered in the Summer.

Courses

• (Fixed) Report with filter by "Voting Faculty". This was attempting to capture instructor status at time of course offering, but that data is not consistently available. This now filters on person's current appointment status so report filter is consistent with "Voting Faculty" list.
• (Fixed) Credit distribution views (in Faculty Activity report and Merit report) did not handle sections missing SCH (this situation comes up for future independent study sections).
• (Feature complete) Added reports for hiring feature including: "Hiring Forms" (positions that need an HR/P form completed), "Enrollment Thresholds" (course offerings that have an Enrollment Threshold added), and "Reader/Grader Hours" (list of reader grader positions and the expected weekly hours).
• (Initial release complete) Hiring feature is deployed to production.
• (Feature complete) Support staff positions are no longer cloned when creating a new planned offering as a copy of a previous offering.
• (Fixed) Additional work on logging of changes to instructional staff. Found a condition where replacing one person with another generated confusing log message.

Hiring

Overall 80% Complete, targeting initial launch 2018 Summer (2 work weeks remaining).

• Added course entry tool. When a user is entering courses related to an appointment request they are prompted with a list of planned offerings from the college Courses database. Selecting an existing course accepts that course's courses number, section, title, credits, and PCE/Seattle-campus offered through values. Planned course list is presented in a tab, user can go back to the "Edit Course" tab to enter their own values for these fields.
• "Who Am I" tool allows a developer to alias self as another user. This is useful for testing authorization and testing workflows and personal views.
• Home page of Hiring database now highlights appointment requests important to the current user including: Needs current user's approval, needs a HR or fiscal approval that current worker can provide, requests started by the current user, general recently submittted requests.
• Add application level menu in the header.
• Add logging for Entered in Workday and Letter Sent stages. These steps now display who completed the step and when. The completed status can be cleared by deleting the date. Changes to these values are included in the log.
• Reworked budget entry tool to make its behavior clearer and fix some bugs. Version 1 of this attempted to embed the interactive form as a row in a table, but this was not clear what was a saved change and what was uncommitted. Broke the add/edit tool out into a separate clear form. Fixed able to manually enter a budget not in the suggestion list. Fixed default splits sometimes negative number.
• Fixed a bug in the split appointment period form. Also converted to use the "split input" that previews new dates for the new periods.

May 7, 2018 – May 18, 2018

Work Complete

Courses

(New feature 90% complete) Continue work on Hiring notes in Courses database. Still wrapping up hiring reports.

• Reworked Hiring tab to make the section more readable, highlight content and de-emphasize UI. Put content in priority order. Remove extraneous text and lines. Better buttons. Better use of whitespace. 
• Instructional staff can be edited from Hiring tab as well as from "Intructional Staff" tab.
• Fixed display of other email addresses when adding an enrollment threshold.
• (Fix complete) fixed the button "Add Offering" in the Future tab.

Hiring

Overall 70% Complete, targeting initial launch 2018 Summer (4 work weeks remaining).

• Better default values when adding budget splits, defaults to 100% on first budget or remaining percentage when adding additional budgets.
• Fixed budget typeahead value could not be selected using mouse.
• Fixed HR sticker form displayed "NaN" in supervisory org code.
• HR staff can add approval while filling out HR sticker form.
• Appointment header is a link that takes user back to appointment detail page.
• Change log implemented. System generates detailed log of changes to an appointment request starting when the appointment request is submitted for department approval.

Student

• (Fix complete) Updated IR contact information.

4/23/2018 – 5/4/2018

Work Complete

Courses

(New feature 85% complete) Continue work on Hiring notes in Courses database. Reviewed work so far with Undergrad team. Finishing up report components and plan to make live this work cycle.

• Enrollment notifications now trigger emails during nightly maintenance.

Hiring

Overall 60% Complete, targeting initial launch 2018 Summer (5 work weeks remaining).

• Budget lookup suggests budgets during data entry from numbers or names.
• HR sticker fields implemented. During NARF, HPR processing HR adds a sticker to the form that annotates the form with instructions for entry in Workday. The fields on the sticker are implemented in Hiring database. The form in the system has helpers that provide similar data entry shortcuts to the physical sticker.
• Approvals are formatted so that resolved approvals (someone responded) display at the bottom of the list in a brief collapsed format. Pending approvals (that still need response) display at top in a expanded view. Both can be clicked to toggle between expanded / collapsed views.
• Section level notes (Course note, Period note, Budget note) are stored in the database with general (Appointment) notes, but have metadata allowing them to be displayed in their section. Section notes styled to take up less space, but be very visible, Post-It note themed.
• Tools to mark the steps "Entered in Workday" and "Letter Sent" complete. Marking these items complete advances the Appointment workflow stage. (Right now these steps display a dummy message, when we implement the full logging system this will support showing who completed the step and when.)

Student

• (Feature complete) Tool to import placement records from a spreadsheet. Imported ECO internship information.
• (Feature complete) Institution select input implemented as a typeahead. User begins typing and similar options are suggested. The institution select list was far too long and similar options could be far away from each other in an alphabetic sort. New input will be easier to use and reduce record duplication.
• (Feature complete) Reviewed edit tool for Placement Mentors to allow for WA state certficate number entry. Use new institution typeahead on Mentor edit.

Infrastructure

• (Feature complete) Extracted COE enhancements to Twitter Typeahead component from the subject specific PersonTypeahead to a general layer that can be reused for multiple subjects.
• (80% complete) Implemented Typeahead in VueJS while continuing to use the powerful Twitter Bloodhound search engine. VueJS is a modern library that allows us to build more sophisticate user interface. Twitter's Typeahead is a jQuery plugin that works great on a single static input, but doesn't integrate well with highly dynamic VueJS components. (Still needs work on mouse input.)

4/9/2018 – 4/20/2018

Work Complete

Courses

(New feature 75% complete) Hiring notes in Courses database will allow administrative staff and program leads to store information related to future hires. The scope of the Courses Hiring feature will be pre-planning and organizing, before things are settled enough to fill out an HRP form. 

Following components of Hiring notes are on the test server and will go to production when the full feature is complete.

• Placeholder TBD person for reader/grader. Allows staff to indicate that a course will have a reader/grader without knowing specifically who that person is.
• New tab on course offering detail page for "Hiring". This tab is only displayed for users with role in hiring process.
• Ability to note that an HRP form was submitted for a short term course related hire.
• Ability to add notes about the budgets used for short term hiring related to a course.
• Ability to enter enrollment thresholds. When an offering's enrollment meets this threshold an email notification will be sent to the specified address. This will support hiring processes that have minimum required enrollment level, e.g. hire a TA or reader/grader. (Email notification is not yet implemented.)

Hiring

Overall 50% Complete, targeting initial launch 2018 Summer.

• Budget editing component. This tool allows entry of complex budget allocations for a short term appointment. Appointment cost can be split across multiple budgets by varying percentage. Budget allocation can change over time.
• Position attributes added that control what inputs a users needs to complete and provide sensible default values. This added more position options to the system, for example "Student: Hourly" was split into "Student: Hourly" and "Student: Work Study". To keep the position list useful, UI was updated to include filter questions "Is this a Student employee?" and "Is the position Course related?" Answers to those questions result in a shorter list of Position options presented to the user.
• Approval routing implemented. This provides staged review and handling of appointment requests. The standard approval workflow includes: Department Approval, HR Approval, Fiscal Approval, Entry in Workday, Letter Sent. Additionally Ad-Hoc approvals can be requested. After any approval is provided the system examines the overall request, figures out what stage it is at, and generates the next required set of approvals.

3/26/2018 – 4/6/2018

Work Complete

Appreview

• (Complete) Updated applicant intent for new Grad School coding when applicant responds "Decline Confirmed".

Courses

• (Complete) Fixed a logging issue where adding staff to an offering logged as "Removed John Smith as instructor. Added John Smith as instructor."

Grants

• (Complete) Check up on grants data updates. This data feeds into the Faculty Merit Data tool.

Hiring Database

Overall 40% Complete, targeting initial launch 2018 Summer.

• Better date picker. Switched the calendar style date selector. New tool has better ability to quickly jump to months and years.
• Restructure periods so that they are not absolutely linked to quarter payroll dates. Period start and end can be set to any date. Removed "linked" period concept. Instead system generates single appointment period and allows user to "split" the period if that is needed (for varying hours or pay).
• Appointment record has start and end date that are automatically updated based on early and late limits of any of the appointment's periods. Overlapping requests (same working, overlapping time period) are now indicated at the appointment request level.
• Position types created. This allowed a lot of code logic to be moved to system configuration making the system easier to manage.
• Course entry is now only prompted for when the appointments position type is course related. When courses are added an appointment period is either created or expanded to include the course's quarter payroll dates.
• (Feature 60% complete) Budgets model built out to capture start and end dates of budget allocation period and % split between multiple budgets. Building an input tool to make entering this information clearer. 

3/12/2018 – 3/23/2018

Work Complete

Courses

• Completed conversion of most UI from Prototype JS to jQuery. 
• Refine the person merge tool so it correctly show the results of the last merge without a page refresh.
• Fixed new instructor summary "John Smith +2" was not displaying in Plan a Quarter tool.
• Database schema updates to support better hiring tracking.
• Add/edit staff form prompts for employee type when entering instructor. Extra value to help with HRP forms.
• Users can enter expected hours when adding Reader/Grader instructional staff record. This optional field is meant to help with staff planning and potentially serve as a check during timesheet approvals.
• Courses configuration "Voting Faculty" now shows NetID, Area, Area Chair and can be downloaded as spreadsheet. This list is updated nightly based on current academic appointment data. 

Hiring 

The hiring database is in early development with HR and Fiscal team.

• Added tools to hiring database to work with UW academic quarters.
• Records that show which user completed an action store actual user data (previously stub data).
• Appointment request shows when there is an overlapping request for the same person and same quarter from a different request (two forms trying to hire same person for same period).
• Appointment request shows indicator for periods that are following hours and pay fields. Editing hours and pay on one of these linked periods updates the values for all.
• Notes can be added (edited, deleted) to an appointment request.
• User management tools. Can add new users searching college person data, assign hiring database roles.
• Beginnings of Approvals workflow. Users can add an Approval or request an Approval to be responded to by another user.
• Implemented person type-ahead input. Text field where user can enter a COE person's name or NetID and be presented with a matching suggestion list as they type.

Merit Reporting

• Prepare Merit Data report (currently accessible from Courses database) for 2018 faculty merit review cycle.
• View Other tool is now accessible to Area Chairs and college support staff. This will help faculty get support when using the data tool.
• Merit Data Report has more background information and instructions describing the report visible directly on the page.
• Merit Data Report has print style applied. When faculty print (hard copy or print to PDF) their report instructions and Courses navigation are hidden.

Infrastructure

• Adjusted html form library to be more flexible when extracting data.

2/26/2018 – 3/9/2018

Work Complete

Appreview

• Student number is displayed on student detail under the applicants name when student has a UW Student Number. This was required for ECFS processing, but decided to be useful for all applications.

Courses

• Work continuing on replacing deprecated JavaScript library.
• Research and fix duplicate curriculum buttons in test environment.

Hiring 

This system is still pre-release. Initial work is being done with HR/P and Fiscal team.

• Implement payroll quarters. UW has fixed recurring payroll periods that correlate with academic quarters. Created a single configuration and date resolution strategy in hiring database that is used throughout that system.
• Implemented summer terms (A, B, Full, Staff) for courses and appointment periods.
• Quick add for academic year. When adding an Autumn appointment request provide checkboxes that say "Continues in Winter", "Continues in Spring".
• Delete an appointment period from a request.
• Appointment request workflow based on courses. If user enters courses first, appointment periods are generated automatically.
• When multiple appointment periods (quarters) are added to an appointment request the hours and pay fields are considered linked by default. Editing any period hours and pay fields updates them all. If user adds a new period with different hours and pay fields that period is unlinked and maintains its own values. User may edit a linked period and specify that this period has its own hours and pay values.
• Update the Appointment Request view to show more data on the default view (without clicking to drill down) and to clarify that this is a single request added by a specific user.
• Update the worker view to show chronological upcoming Appointment periods where this worker has been requested. Clicking those periods leads to the Appointment Request detail view.
• System can provide current academic quarter. Used our UwQuarter shared library and shared data view maintained by "EDUC" project to have access to UW academic quarter actual dates.

Student

• Add single ethnicity value to student data. While student data includes multiple ethnicities per person we frequently have reporting requirements that ask us to simplify this data down into a single value per person to report demographically. We've made this aggregation part of the nightly student data update. This data is available to IR reporting, but not displayed in web application.
• The course planning report now accounts for milestones. Course planning report uses milestone configuration to show a list of student who need to take a given course. Version 1 of this just showed student information in relation to the specific course (completed, enrolled, need). Version 2 also examines the related milestones of the student to see whether the student has completed or enrolled in a comparable course (student took EDUC 305 or EDUC 310) or whether the requirement was waived.
• Fixed problem with downloading CSV spreadsheet of Generated Placement records.

Tech Support

• Import equipment inventory from spreadsheet for Cultivate Learning. Import process that converts spreadsheet to machine, specs, and person records in the COE ticket system.
• Replace URL generator that was using deprecated PHP function.

Infrastructure

• Configured mail on production web server to send server administration email to web administrator.