v0.18.0 - Evidence Authority and Review UX

v0.18.0 — Evidence Authority and Review UX

This release consolidates the Engineering Studio work since v0.17.0 on frozen evidence hydration, phase-aware dialogue, equivalent-evidence discovery, reviewer challenges, explicit finding lifecycle and the Review Room / Engineering Evidence journey.

• Shared software version authority for API/OpenAPI and health.
• Clear source inspection and supporting-evidence actions, snapshot context and optional review context.
• Machine-action transcript labels and preservation of private drafts.
• Dialog keyboard focus containment/restoration and safe Escape behavior.
• Updated root README, current repository documentation and all 12 formal Word/PDF manuals.
• Development pytest 9.0.3 security update; production PyJWT remains 2.15.1.

Production uses explicit shadow reasoning validation and shadow review planning. Legacy reasoning and student-visible selection remain authoritative; no PR5 authority transfer is included. Frozen snapshot FACT remains immutable; reviewer interpretation remains challengeable. Only authoritative corrected/resolved findings close. Inspection, fluency, recommendations, review completion and later commits do not silently close older findings or imply grades.

Production acceptance was established for source 6ba92bf through protected deployment 37081818322, revision etis-studio-prod--0000102, operator acceptance and maintainer human smoke. Subsequent documentation-only corrections and release-edition finalization have separate source provenance. See docs/operations/V018_PRODUCTION_ACCEPTANCE_2026-10-02.md for the dated record.

Local validation: 972 tests passed, with two PostgreSQL integration tests skipped locally; protected CI/deployment included PostgreSQL, Bicep, dependency audit and production container checks. Existing offline journey and keyboard war games passed. All 12 paired manuals were rendered and visually verified. Historical screenshot/diagram bitmaps retain documented small/low-contrast-label limitations; no accessibility certification or live semantic-quality proof is claimed.

The accepted Review Room / Engineering Evidence UX is frozen. See docs/NEXT_BUILD.md for the revalidated backlog. Historical release, baseline and Gate17 evidence retains its original versions and dates. GitHub's release/tag metadata records the actual publication timestamp.

Final release acceptance:

• Commit: d2d4a4c
• Successful deployment: https://github.com/etis-framework/etis-engineering-studio/actions/runs/37084900540
• Production revision: etis-studio-prod--0000103
• Live version: 0.18.0; reasoning validation and review planning: shadow/shadow
• Production acceptance, readiness and final human smoke: PASS

v0.17.0 - Analytical Engine Evolution

v0.17.0 — Analytical Engine Evolution

v0.17.0 substantially advances the ETIS Engineering Studio's phase-gate reasoning, apprenticeship coaching, evidence analysis, and analytical-control architecture.

Highlights

• Phase-specific Board Review: A1–A6 executive summaries, prioritized Board Agendas, non-numeric Readiness Maps, repeated-review delta, submission-baseline guidance, and cross-artifact reasoning.
• Deeper engineering analysis: Reviews reason across claims, evidence, authority, assumptions, contradictions, control maturity, demonstrated outcomes, and claim strength rather than treating artifacts as checklist items.
• Adaptive apprenticeship coaching: Coaching progresses from challenge/reframe → nudge → scaffold → direct teaching → application/teach-back when needed, while keeping engineering decisions with the student.
• Progressive-disclosure student UX: The active concern and coaching conversation stay primary, with detailed readiness, evidence, guidance, and findings available on demand.
• Frozen-evidence artifact review: Students can ask the Board directly about a selected repository artifact and receive semantic feedback grounded in that artifact's frozen review snapshot rather than live repository state.
• Evidence-safe semantic context: Selected artifact content remains bounded, sanitized, and quarantined where appropriate, with valid structured context maintained under prompt limits.
• Analytical control plane: Introduces explicit Review Objectives, planning context, candidate next moves, structured selection/rejection semantics, and session-locked analytical modes.
• Shadow reasoning and planning architecture: Adds independent reasoning validation and planner/selector/realizer infrastructure with fail-closed authority boundaries and internal telemetry.
• Analytical evaluation and war-gaming: Adds a 42-case A1–A6 engineering reasoning corpus, deterministic replay, replicated acquisition, stability analysis, blinded A/B review infrastructure, and explicit enablement thresholds.

Compatibility and Authority

The analytical shadow capabilities remain non-authoritative unless explicitly enabled for a session. Frozen repository evidence remains authoritative; shadow validation and planning do not independently alter student-visible readiness, recommendations, finding lifecycle, or engineering decisions.

Existing v0.16.1 sessions remain compatible and continue using legacy reasoning and planning when no v0.17 analytical-control state is present.

Validation

v0.17.0 passed the full automated regression suite, CI, shadow deployment, and production-test-student smoke validation before release.

For the complete engineering change history, evaluation calibration, and compatibility details, see CHANGELOG.md and the v0.17 analytical architecture documents in docs/architecture/.

ETIS Engineering Studio v0.16.0 — Production-Accepted Institutional Release

ETIS Engineering Studio v0.16.0

This release is the first production-accepted ETIS Engineering Studio baseline prepared for institutional adoption.

ETIS Engineering Studio is a browser-based engineering judgment environment designed to help software engineering students practice evidence-based technical decision-making. Students remain the responsible engineers; AI reviewers act as bounded advisers rather than graders or decision authorities.

Highlights

• Production-hardened Microsoft Entra authentication and authorization
• GitHub identity linking and team repository onboarding
• GitHub App installation model using repository-scoped authorization
• Exact repository verification for personal and organization-owned repositories
• Frozen evidence snapshots and provenance-aware engineering review
• Board Review, Focused Review, and Review Findings workflows
• Instructor Command Center and section-aware administration
• Semester lifecycle support for setup, active, and archived terms
• Review continuity, finding lifecycle, and preserved engineering records
• Production Azure deployment with PostgreSQL, Key Vault, managed identity, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and alerting
• Point-in-time database recovery validation
• Immutable container-image rollback capability
• Cost controls and production budget alerting
• Public documentation for institutional deployment and adoption

Institutional adoption

This release includes documentation for institutions that want to operate their own ETIS Engineering Studio deployment.

Adopting institutions should provision and own their own:

• cloud infrastructure;
• identity registration;
• GitHub App and OAuth configuration;
• database and backup policy;
• domain and TLS configuration;
• secrets and Key Vault resources;
• OpenAI project and cost controls;
• monitoring and alerting;
• privacy, retention, and course-administration policies.

See:

• docs/INSTITUTIONAL_ADOPTION.md
• docs/PUBLIC_DEPLOYMENT_SECURITY.md
• docs/AZURE_DEPLOYMENT.md
• docs/SECURITY_AND_PRIVACY.md
• docs/PRODUCTION_BASELINE.md

Production acceptance

The reference deployment completed post-provisioning production acceptance on August 21, 2026.

Validated areas included:

• authentication and authorization;
• GitHub repository onboarding;
• managed identity and Key Vault integration;
• container health and readiness;
• observability and operational alerts;
• PostgreSQL backup and point-in-time restore;
• rollback readiness;
• cost controls;
• semester lifecycle behavior;
• student and instructor production workflows.

The original production-acceptance snapshot reported application version 0.15.0. Version metadata was subsequently aligned to 0.16.0 for this release without changing the underlying accepted application behavior.

Security

Security-sensitive values are not stored in the repository.

The reference production architecture uses:

• Azure managed identity;
• Azure Key Vault secret references;
• GitHub Actions OIDC for Azure authentication;
• repository-scoped GitHub App installation;
• fail-closed authorization boundaries;
• protected production deployment paths.

Security issues should be reported using the process described in SECURITY.md.

Licensing

ETIS Engineering Studio is released under the Apache License 2.0.

See:

• LICENSE
• NOTICE
• TRADEMARKS.md

Known operational notes

• The accepted production runtime uses minReplicas=1 and maxReplicas=5.
• Source-controlled infrastructure currently requires a follow-up alignment of the Container App minReplicas default before the next infrastructure-changing release.
• Multi-student repository owner/non-owner propagation is covered by automated tests and CI; the production acceptance team used a single production-test student identity.
• Production rollback capability was verified through retained immutable images; production was not deliberately rolled backward solely for acceptance.

Release commit

00aad4568fe59ffae8430c58935573530f243400