One of the pain points for any company that relies on part-time labour is scheduling staff shifts. At the company that I work for, it's made even more complicated by the union agreements that regulate when specific staff can work and who gets priority for a given shift. Unfortunately, those rules make it impossible to use most of the available scheduling platforms out there.
For a long time, that meant that the managers at my company would use a combination of paper and email to create schedules, post shifts, and track who was working.
When I moved into the role that I'm in now, I knew that one of my priorities was building an application that would allow quick, painless and easy scheduling for staff and managers.
The application runs on React on for the frontend and NodeJS/Express for the backend with a PostgreSQL database. It's the first full-scale React application that I built, and I learned so much throughout the process!
From building out an extensible database schema to designing well thought out user interfaces, from enforcing business rules in the API to debugging edge cases in complex interactions, this was a complicated project from beginning to end.
My favourite part of developing the app was building out a release schedule, implementing semantic versioning, setting up issue tracking, and using Github's Kanban project boards to track progress.
Although I was the primary developer on the project, I had several colleagues actively involved in the development process. We would meet regularly to discuss features, bugs, and design. From those meetings, I would detail technical requirements and create a roadmap for release in two weeks sprints.
Here is an example release:
Hi all –
Version 0.5.0 of the scheduling app has just gone to test!
This has three pretty big new features. Please logout and login again before taking a look in the app itself.
I've implemented user groups! That means that data across the whole application segments according to these groups – there is no way to see the schedules and data of other groups and vice versa.
Users can be part of multiple user groups (accounting for the case when we have someone who works in various departments), and they can select which user group they would like when logging in.
Only reference data lives between user groups (locations and statuses)
Also, note that this is a significant change – let's be on the lookout for bugs!
Users can now specify global availability across all schedules – i.e., I can't ever work on Sundays.
This displays for admin users when creating schedules, so that they know why someone may or may not have added a bid.
The app now has a screen for admin users to update the seniority points for a given user. It will automatically calculate how many points the app thinks should be added. Still, I recommend double-checking that manually against the schedule to ensure that it's correct, especially in the initial stages. Admin users can adjust the seniority points to add (or subtract) manually.
Design updates throughout the application
Reports have a separate button to run each report instead of one main buttonn
Major refactor of how modals work in the Shift page, which does not affect how it works or appears, but makes it MUCH more maintainable.
At the end of the project, it was incredible to see how much easier it would make our team's lives, saving dozens of hours of staff time in just a single quarter.