Hi Maurice.

We thought about this during development and it was implemented like this intentionally. I'll explain why.

Progress from one stage to the next is done automatically when the last user with any questions has clicked the "Complete Stage" button.

If we instead decided to automatically progress to the next stage when all users with _required_ questions have clicked "Complete Stage" then we'd cause several problems:

• If there is only one person with required questions and they complete the stage then they could deny the other users the opportunity to answer their optional questions.
• If there are no people with required questions (as in your example) the system would either skip the stage altogether, or we would have to program it to move to the next stage after the first person completes the stage, which again denies the other users the opportunity to answer the stage.

An option that might work is to implement manual stage progression. This would require an interface which allows some user to click a button and say "This stage is complete, go on to the next". This solution wasn't implemented for several reasons. There would have to be some way of controlling who could push this button. How do they know if the other users have had the opportunity to submit their optional answers? (I haven't spent a lot of time thinking this option through, but I have the feeling that we would discover more problems related to this.) These things would require quite a lot of work to implement and would greatly increase the complexity of setting up and using the appraisals. 

As it is, the interface makes it clear which users need to complete the stage before the appraisal will progress to the next. This should allow the users who are waiting to get in contact with the people they are waiting on and ask them to have a look and submit their answers (or just click Next/Complete Stage if they are not required to answer). Also, people can easily see the status of their active reports and can see when they need to contribute.

If you can think of any improvements which we could make then please let us know. If you were to get some custom work done to implement a "Go to next stage" button or anything else related to appraisals then I'd be keen to review it and see if it would be suitable for integration into core Totara (you'd have to get advice from someone else about how contributions to Totara works, I'm just a dev :).

Nathan