Weeks of 2/23 & 3/2 - Development Standup Thread

[azdak]

6-Month Roadmap
Hung Scan Postmortem

New

• (2/18 roadmap meeting) Need to add specifics on which rulesets veraPDF and axe-core are using to scan to documentation
  • PDF: PDF/UA-2, ISO 16684-2
  • HTML: Default Axe-Core ruleset, with additional checks for empty alt tags for images and warning for any PDF link
• (@azdak proposed 3/4) Evaluate https://github.com/EqualifyEverything/equalify-uic-utilties
• (@azdak proposed 3/5) Better loading state for summary view; on large scans it can take a bit to update (which can be refactored later) but in the meantime should have better feedback for the user that it's loading
• (Michael 3/5) Inconsistent Last Scan Date #589
• (Michael 3/5) Email Notification Not Sent #590 Double-check email delivery fix is working

Outstanding

@azdak To Dos:

• (@azdak proposed 2/9) Audits screen: Add Sort by to table view
• (@azdak proposed 2/6) Switch blockers table "Active/Ignore" and "HTML/PDF" filter controls to select boxes instead of custom styled (this should add some more visual uniformity and make styling simpler when we later do a more comprehensive restyle)
• Remote CSV integration:
  • audits table: add field { external-csv: URL }
  • add as option/step to set external-csv in build audit
  • on scan:
    • if(external-csv) fetch remote csv
    • (error on audit screen if fails)
    • parse remote csv
    • union with existing audit urls (maintain existing URL IDs)
    • scan then runs as normal
  • Audit Screen: URL table should list URLs from last scan but not be editable
  • Audit Screen: indicate external CSV mode and show editable CSV URL

@heythisischris To Dos:

• (From 2/5 Service Team Meeting) Look into production email deliverability (reported from testing)
• (proposed 1/22) Fix URL for prod Hasura
• Fix rate-limit issues in Equalify Hub!
• Coordinate meeting w/ Helen & Michael on documentation workflow AND ask about how Equalify communications are handled, what team is responsible, and how we can properly coordinate updates / FAQ / etc.
• Monthly reporting; need Hub functionality for this and to get on a regular schedule
  • Ability to collect and report on KPIs from 1st of each month
  • First report delivered March 1st, 2026
  • Should be able to take in markdown content and format pretty, export to PDF (we can even re-use Equalify Hub Updates page template)
  • It's just like updates, but we are calling it REPORTS. equalify-docs/reports.
• Increase soft quotas on AWS for Lambda Concurrency, SQS, increase DB size before production roll out. Add sensible WAF rate limit configuration.
• Have a conversation with Blake & Dean to separate out PDF costs from Equalify costs in AWS account, also get a sense of what our cost ceiling is, limits, their recommendations, etc.
• Add sensible constraints to Equalify defaults (i.e. 10,000 URLs per audit, 10,000 audits per user, etc).
  • Maybe we'd prefer soft limit messaging instead of hard limits. I.e., a user adds over 10,000 URLs, we display a message stating this is a large number and will take longer to process, are they sure they want to proceed?
  • When setting or changing the scheduled scan, warning for daily scans for audits over 10,000 URLs?
• (2/18 roadmap meeting) "Teams" section in https://equalify.uic.edu/user-guide/user-roles is pretty unclear and leading to some confusion about a "team" feature, and not a reference to the Equalify instance. Need to clarify this language
• Fix Helen Blank Screen Bug - likely stemmed from resources hitting their limits, if not, we'll investigate SPA caching issues.
• Work on DB Schema version control and Hasura metadata version control
• (@azdak proposed 3/4) Testing for CSV integration prior to merge

New

• (@azdak / @heythisischris proposed 2/4) Add wiki-style issue descriptions for blocker page, potentially open-source repo.
• (Optional/modular) LLM for single blocker issue description and next steps generation

Future Sprints

(pending development priority decision, and in no particular order)

FOSS Sprint aka Infrastructure Week (1-2 weeks)

• Determine IaC/Provisioning Framework (Terraform, OpenTofu, whatever): This allows any user to be able to deploy, provisioning the script to run on any external environment.
• Create BUILD SCRIPTS 💀: This sets a template to get the code onto servers that are provisioned.
• Determine deployment strategy: Figure out how to handle deployment
• Provisioning & Deployment Documentation: Technical documentation for deployment
• User Documentation: Developer-focused Readme to introduce how to use the app from a high level.

Design & Maintenance Sprint (1-2 weeks)

• Get alignment on overall visual direction and palette
• Branding: Defining how branding is handled on the system.
• Design System: Atomic system or Storybook for component uniformity
• Darkmode 😎
• Mobile breakpoints
• Style and Code Cleanup: Finish componentizing, minimize global styles, and code cleanup

Onboard Features Sprint (1-2 weeks)

• Site onboarding features
  • Lambda for site crawling
  • Integrate onboarding features into Build Audit
• Allow external, linked CSVs as basis for Audit URLs (with regular or just-in-time on-scan re-scrapes), allowing WordPress plugin integration
• CSV User import

Backlog/Blocked

• Help text first pass
  • ID icon areas
  • Refactor HelperTooltip component
  • Write help text
• Integrate error reporting into "blockers over time" scans table (also possibly the graph?)

[heythisischris]

On Friday, February 27th, 2026, we experienced degraded performance on our Equalify database. We fixed the core indexing issues and decided to upgrade from a t4g.micro instance size to m8g.xlarge- this is more than enough to prevent performance degradation while we investigate which SQL queries to optimize for.