Get Stoked - End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.
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Mentors | James Dailey |
Overview & Objectives | |
Description |
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Helpful Skills | SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Web Services |
Impact | Providers of pay-as-you-go solar can use MIFOS for their operations. MFIs can become such providers. |
Other Resources | Mobile project on MifosX |
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Mentors | Nayan Ambali |
Overview & Objectives | At present MIfos X platform is shipped with Community-App (SPA) as default UI, but initial load time of the application high. And for users on narrow bandwidth internet it takes a considerable amount of time to load the app. Instead of loading the app every time, we can convert the Community-App into a Chrome App and user can download them once and install it ion the machine, and it can used as thick client. |
Description | Community-App is completely developed on top of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. And Chrome apps are also written in same stack. Using grunt we should be able to repackage Community-App(SPA) into Community-App(Chrome App) |
Helpful Skills | Javascript, AngularJS, Grunt |
Impact | Users with slow internet connectivity can use this app (Installed on the machine) instead of loading Community-App (SPA) on the browser. Users will also have a continually updated app. This will also allow MFIs to potentially use Chromebooks as field-based devices for their branches. |
Other Resources | http://developer.chrome.com/apps/angular_framework.html |
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Mentors | Binny Gopinath Sreevas (Unlicensed) |
Overview & Objectives | Right now Mifos X contains core client management functionalities including tracking basic demographic information, know your customer information, document management, and survey collection through data tables. As financial institutions serving the poor begin to offer a more in-depth and diverse range of financial inclusion products, the need for more robust client management and in-depth client understanding has grows. Their core system needs to provide more and more CRM-type functionality that complement the portfolio management and financial/social reporting the Mifos X provides. This project will work to deliver the initial set of customer relationship management functionalities including a module for tracking inquiries, complaints |
Description | This module will have a request management functionality. A request can be of 2 types: Complaints and Service Requests. Each request must be against a customer and optionally against an account of the customer. Each request will go through a simple workflow. Actions that can be performed on a request: Assign -> will change status to "assigned" Start Work --> will change status to "in progress" Close --> will change status to "closed" (with a sub-reason code) At each step user can enter comments. The customer summary screen will have a link to view the requests of the customer - along with a summary and current status - with option to click-through to get the complete history of each request. |
Helpful Skills | |
Impact | Deepening the client relationship and ensuring fair, responsible, and transparent financial services to the poor is a core piece of the industry's roadmap for financial inclusion. Providing customers the ability to voice their concerns and feedback about the services they're receiving provides a simple yet powerful tool to protect the client. Empowering the financial institution with the ability to track these inquiries and overall maintain a more holistic relationship tracking entire lifecycle of their clients gives them a much better ability to understand their clients and respond to their needs with appropriately designed services and products. |
Other Resources |
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Security Penetration testing
Mentors | KojoG |
Overview & Objectives | This project would seek to create one unified ID/login and profile for community members similar to the OpenMRS ID. It would achieve the following two primary objectives:
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Description |
Design a profile Extra Credit:
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Helpful Skills | LDAP |
Impact | Impact is two-fold:
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Other Resources |
Make Mifos X DB-Agnostic - Flexible configuration allowing other databases, incl. tests & doc on Oracle
Mentors | Anuruddha Premalal |
Overview & Objectives | Initial version of Mifos X was not designed to be database agnostic. Goal of this project is to make it so, and test this out in practice by running it locally on Oracle, make sure our test suite runs against Oracle as well as mysql, and well documenting how this can be set up by end-user clients, if they wish to go for this deployment. |
Description | To make this possible, all business logic has to be concentrated in the middle tier with the database being as dumb as possible. This means the platform does not rely on any database specific stored procedures or on the database to generate unique keys. And also application heavily use prepared statements (Spring jdbctemplate) for retrieving data and need to make sure all these queries use full JOIN syntax, and bracket the JOINs so that each join is between a single table and bracketed expression. |
Helpful Skills | SQL, Java |
Impact | MFI with large client base can use the application with Oracle or any other commercial databases. |
Other Resources | Mifos has abstraction from underlying database using: |
Self-contained standalone package, Linux/*ix & Windows Installers, incl. Embedded Database
Mentors | Anuruddha Premalal (plus Michael Vorburger, as needed) |
Overview & Objectives | Primary objective of this project is to build a standalone installer for MifosX platform. Standalone installer is a great way to evaluate and explore MifosX platform quickly. We want:
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Description | Standalone installer will consist of an embeded apache server and a DB. It should also ship with the latest mifosx build war file which should automatically deployed 1. Develop the installer as an executable jar format so that it will support many platforms with JRE. GUI MODE OPTIONS Tomcat Port This is the port at which to run tomcat. COMMAND LINE OPTIONS -mysqlport Use to override the mysql port in the runtime properties file. This sub-project would port / apply our MIFOS-5157 Installer-free simple launcher from classic Mifos to Mifos X, and then look at how to extend such a package to run without any existing external database as planned in MIFOS-4926 (which MIFOS-5157 doesn't cover). The first thought that comes to mind is to achieve this with a pure-Java in-memory database such as H2 or Derby. However, in order to avoid maintaining & supporting 2 different databases for Mifos, we'd like to base this on https://github.com/vorburger/MariaDB4j. While we are at it, we should also replace the classic GPL mysql driver by the LGPL MariaDB Client Library. |
Helpful Skills | SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Web Services, Big Data (Hadoop, Hive) |
Impact | For many microfinance institutions who lack technical skills, installing Mifos X is a burden that prevents them from using this software to more efficiently serve the poor. Often they get lost in the installation process when having to separately install java, their web server, MySQL, and then deploy Mifos. A self-contained package acting as a simple one-step installer for Mifos would help make the software more accessible to more organizations and allow for MFI to more easily test the software and see the immense value it provides. |
Other Resources | https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/OpenMRS+Standalone See Linux Installers wiki page |
Mifos X on "Enterprise Stack" - IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic tests & documentation
Mentors | Michael Vorburger |
Overview & Objectives | Mifos X today is typically used on Tomcat (with Jetty known to work). For a certain class of users, testing it on "Enterprise Stack" application servers (meaning IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic) is desirable - this project would properly test Mifos X on these configurations, make any adaptations to the code which may be required, and produce easy to follow documentation or even small tools helping future users how to go about this. |
Description | This project could be combined with and taken up by the same candidate as the Enterprise database project. |
Helpful Skills | Java, Application Server configuration, WAS classloading crap tricks, documentation writing. Use Cargo, Arquillian etc. for automated testing against WAS & WLS containers? |
Impact | Enable Mifos X to be considered by users wanting it to run (only) on an Enterprise stack
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Other Resources | Vendor pages |
Mifos X SDK
Mentors | Michael Vorburger |
Overview & Objectives | The Mifos X platform as of today is a well structure but monolithic code base - one Git repo, one build, one WAR. This has worked out well for us, but as we grow, it could be interesting to introduce a proper SDK and plug-in concept, allowing contributors to build individual JARs that can be dropped into a certain directory of Mifos X to augment the core platform on well defined extension points and hooks. These modules would be loaded at run-time, not require rebuilding Mifos X, and would remain compatible when a customer upgrades their core platform version. We currently see the SDK as something more relevant to the Java back-end, so in this project you would likely work less on our AngularJS UI (barring some configuration UI for the plug-ins probably); but if you do have any ideas how to make the front-end more modular and extensible as well, we would love to hear from you. |
Description | This project will have three axis/phases: 1. platform infrastructure framework kind of work, based on a very simple or fictitious example extension; 2. identifying the functionally which could require / be sensible to extend in Mifos X, extracting clear and documented Java APIs from it, and then make changes to existing functional platform services to make them extensible by plug-ins; 3. well document this - such plugins will only be written if it's easy and clear how to do this. Note that the more technical part 1. should only take about 1/4 of your project, the focus will have to be putting the "theory" from 1. into "practice" in phases 2. & 3. |
Helpful Skills | Java, modularity, API design, dynamic class loading, OSGi-like concepts (without any plans to actually move Mifos X to running on an OSGi kernel; it's unnecessary complexity, for this) |
Impact | Developers from partnering organisations would be able to more easily extend the core Mifos X by extension code running in-process the platform (as opposed to REST-based |
Other Resources | Many other Java-based platform have such mechanism, and you would be expected to draw at least conceptual, if not outright technical inspiration (re-using code, if feasible) from things like the Eclipse Plug-In architecture (or similar non-OSGi based ones in other IDEs), research if Spring itself or some extension from someone has anything useful for this (think like Guice Multibindings plus ServiceLoader API as discussed on this StackOverflow, or this blog, or these Mycila Guice Extensions; but without going all the way to OSGi-based Spring DM / Dynamic Modules; again, overkill, here), get inspiration from drop-in add-on modules extension capabilities in enterprise software such as e.g. Atlassian plug-in framework, and learn how e.g. our friends at OpenMRS do this (see OpenMRS SDK doc and OpenMRS project). |
Mobile Field Office Planner
Mentors | Sander van der Heyden |
Overview & Objectives | To allow field-based staff to manage their daily schedules and to ensure that their supervisors are able to review these tasks and to plan field operations and bring in more efficiency and transparency for field operations |
Description | Field officers typically have a predefined set of tasks to follow, for example: Do survey for a locality, Conduct Group Trainings, Conduct Group Tests, Do Center Meetings and Collections. Each could have a task code to make operations streamlined. Field officers manage their calendars by selecting an activity and specifying a center, date and time for which this activity is planned. This becomes their planned activity for this slot. A simple workflow to manage each slot – when field officer starts the activity, status of the slot is changed from “new” to “open” and when the activity is completed, it is set to “closed”. It would be ideal to manage this workflow using a mobile tool – preferably an inbound SMS message. For example: an SMS from the field officer’s phone with the text “OPEN 1430” will change the status to “OPEN” of the field officer’s activity that was planned for 2:30pm. Field officer may change his plan up to a certain time prior to the start of the activity. Auditors and branch managers will review the activities and track the field officers’ planning and efficiency. |
Helpful Skills | Java, SQL , Git, SMS integration |
Impact | Field efficiency and operational efficiency |
Other Resources | See SMS Integration and Outbound SMS |
Web-based Ad Hoc Query and Reporting Tool
Mentors | Nayan Ambali |
Overview & Objectives | To run any business successfully, you need the insight of the business and that is possible when you have information system in which you can get the information in the format your business analysis team needs. And in current world business are very much market adaptive and market scenarios changes very rapidly. To cope up with that good MIS need to have Ad-hoc report builder. Easy-to-use, drag-and-drop report designer builds crosstabs, tables, and chart-based reports using a standard browser. |
Description | The ad hoc reporting will be based on a logical mapping of Mifos data elements to business entities (like customer, loan account, savings account, loan transactions, savings transactions etc.) and business attributes (like loan approved date, loan amount, loan outstanding amount etc.). An end user will be able to configure and generate reports based on these business entities and business attributes. Reporting fields and reporting criteria will support basic derived fields like "days overdue", "amount overdue", "customer total outstanding amount", "customer total relationship value" etc. The reporting will support basic functions like summing up totals, sorting based on different fields and grouping based on different fields. |
Helpful Skills | SQL, Pentaho reporting, DW concepts. |
Impact | Business analysis team, funders, management or operational users can get the required data in real time instead of depending on someone to develop reports. Helps in taking quick decisions as data is available immediately. |
Other Resources | http://community.pentaho.com/faq/waqr_faq.php |
Actionable notifications/alerts/status updates in Mifos X
Mentors | Nayan Ambali |
Overview & Objectives | For better usability system needs to have notifications to the logged in user about actions he/she needs to perform in the application.
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Description | Build real time notification system in application to notify to users about pending/new actions she/he needs to take. Example if branch manager login to the application and 3 new loans are created and pending for approval then system should notify him/her about the pending actions. This involves both invoking and triggering these notifications based on these actions or activities as well as the extension of the user interface to support the display of the notifications as well as the ability of the user to take action upon the notifications. |
Helpful Skills | Javascript, CSS, HTML5. AngularJS and Bootstrap (CSS framework) is plus |
Impact | Better usability. improve the productivity of users and actions will be taken on time. |
Other Resources | Usability and Design |
Business Analytics (OLAP)
Mentors | KojoG |
Overview & Objectives | Develop ETL scripts to create OLAP cubes (fact and dimension tables in MySQL). This will allow managers to perform ad hoc slicing and dicing of their data
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Description |
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Helpful Skills | Database Management Systems, MDX, SQL, |
Impact | Data drives a microfinance institution - the more powerful and robust analytical tools management has, the better they can tailor their services and outreach to impact the poor most effectively. |
Other Resources | Saiku Analytics Demo - demo.analytical-labs.com Wikipedia OLAP Article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olap Introduction to OLAP - http://www.db-class.org/course/video/preview_list Gentle Introduction to MDX - http://www.iccube.com/support/documentation/mdx_tutorial/gentle_introduction.html |
Client Impact Portal
Mentors | Sander van der Heyden |
Overview & Objectives | Microfinance institutions usually work with various external parties, such as funders or investors. Using the data that is available in MifosX we would like to offer those stakeholders a seperate portal showing accurate and high-level information about the institution that would otherwise be reported manually by the institution. This information helps them in their decision making processes, but also enables them to assess the broader impact they are having with their funding. |
Description | To develop a portal that aggregates information from different Mifos X deployments and report on predefined social and operational metrics Objectives:
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Helpful Skills | SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Web Services |
Impact | Funders and investors are vital for almost all MFI's, providing them with accurate information on the impact they are making with each of their MFI's is something they highly value and that enables them to assess whether they want to further support the MFI's moving forward to enable growth of the MFI. |
Other Resources | Data Analytics & Client Insight - Are we making an impact? (Client Impact Portal demo) |
Web UI quality cross browser non-regression testing
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While the Mifos X Community App front-end UI based on AngularJS-based currently does already have some JS unit tests, we lack a full UI level web tests which continually non-regression test common scenarios. We believe having this could add value in terms of quality, including ensuring automated cross browser testing.
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Possibly building upon a extremely limited small scale existing POC (if you find it to be a useful starting point), your mission, should you chose to accept it, would be to build out comprehensive UI walk through scenario test coverage for the Mifos X UI. If you can build more such tests faster and more maintainable (= less code) by using any of the existing frameworks listed below or others you know of / will find, or build useful such infrastructure yourself as part of this code, we're eager to hear from you! Keep in mind that the main deliverable of this project is not (only) a foundation framework, but must actually include an extensive suite of running tests integrated into the Mifos build.
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http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/
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https://github.com/vorburger/webdriver-runner
https://saucelabs.com or https://browserling.com
https://github.com/FluentLenium/FluentLenium
Security Penetration testing
Mentors | KojoG |
Overview & Objectives | We believe the Mifos X platform is super secure and impenetrable. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to prove us wrong, and help close gaps you may find. |
Description | Beyond a one time exercise, you should integrate (some of) the tools you've used into our build chain so that, even after you've gone, tools flag up future newly introduced potential vulnerabilities. |
Helpful Skills | Candidates applying for this project would ideally have prior experience in penetration testing, and document this in their application. |
Impact | Re-assuring the more Entreprise-y type Mifos clients that they can safely bet on Mifos X as an MFI platform. |
Other Resources | We believe the Mifos X platform is super secure and impenetrable. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to prove us wrong, and help close gaps you may find. |
Description | Beyond a one time exercise, you should integrate (some of) the tools you've used into our build chain so that, even after you've gone, tools flag up future newly introduced potential vulnerabilities. |
Helpful Skills | Candidates applying for this project would ideally have prior experience in penetration testing, and document this in their application. |
Impact | Re-assuring the more Entreprise-y type Mifos clients that they can safely bet on Mifos X as an MFI platform. |
Other Resources | https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page https://code.google.com/p/zaproxy/ Run FindBugs & related tools for some serious static code analysis |
Scalability testing, reports, infrastructure for ongoing test, documentation
Mentors | Vishwas Babu A J |
Overview & Objectives | During last year's GSoC 2013, star student (and GSoC 2014 mentor) Anuruddha has greatly contributed to the scalability of the Mifos X by adding server-side pagination and distributed caching to the platform. This project's goal is to measure just how well we really scale - with concrete scenarios and hard numbers, and produce documentation about this helping organization who are evaluating Mifos. Beyond a one time exercise, you should set up infrastructure we can keep using, and integrate the tools you've used into our build chain so that, even after you've gone, help us to keep up good perf. |
Description |
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Helpful Skills | |
Impact | Re-assuring the more Entreprise-y type Mifos clients that they can safely bet on Mifos X as an MFI platform. |
Other Resources | http://twitter.github.io/iago/ http://www.loadui.org (by the good people behind SOAPui) Selenium WebDriver |
UI meta modeling, making screen adaption a configuration instead of coding activity
Mentors | Michael Vorburger |
Overview & Objectives | The AngularJS-based Mifos X UI, like most of today's AngularJS-based or really most web apps, is "coded out" with JavaScript & HTML partial views. This project aims to explore and deliver at least partially working solution, based on and applied to Mifos X UI as a "case study", how web UI of modern SPA web applications can be "modeled" (described), and "generated" (at build, or better, runtime right within the browser). Advantages of such a model driven (MDA / MDD) approach incl. that less technical users can change screen definitions themselves, and that changes to the underlying technical architecture (e.g. AngularJS version and other JS frameworks used) ideally only affect the generators, not the functional screen models. |
Description | You could base this on ongoing explorations in https://github.com/vorburger/MUI.js, and using EFactory / ESON as model syntax (see https://github.com/vorburger/efactory; ESON a JSON-like EMF Xtext technology which is currently being incubated as a formal eclipse.org project). The goal and expected outcome of this project isn't some write up, but actually running code. |
Helpful Skills | Conceptual Modeling, JavaScript, advanced AngularJS, curious and creative mind, capability to actually deliver |
Impact | Enable the Mifos X UI to be much more easily customized and adapted by end-users |
Other Resources | see links above |
Extend Community app to run on Mobile devices with Offline Support
Mentors | Vishwas Babu A J |
Overview & Objectives | MIfos X platform is shipped with a Community-App (SPA) as the default UI which is optimized for Web Browser display on large screens (Mobile, Laptops and Tablets). We need to extend the same to support mobile views (with minor changes to workflow) and provide offline functionality |
Description | Community-App is completely developed on top of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Also since there is a clear separation between the view and the Controllers in Angular JS, we should be able to spin up mobile views fairly easily reusing the same Controllers and Services. As it is quite common for Mobile users to have intermittent data connection, we should also support offline functionality, |
Helpful Skills | Javascript, AngularJS, Apache cordova |
Impact | Field officers can access MifosX from a Mobile optimized view, capture data offline that can be synced back to the server when an internet connection is available. It also becomes easier for the community volunteers to maintain the mobile view ( as we reuse most of the code from the Community app) as opposed to maintaining a separate Android app. |
Other Resources |
Mifos ID/Profile - Single Sign On for Community Infrastructure
Mentors | KojoG |
Overview & Objectives | This project would seek to create one unified ID/login and profile for community members similar to the OpenMRS ID. It would achieve the following two primary objectives:
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Description |
Design a profile Extra Credit:
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Helpful Skills | LDAP |
Impact | Impact is two-fold:
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Other Resources |
Make Mifos X DB-Agnostic - Flexible configuration allowing other databases, incl. tests & doc on Oracle
Mentors | Anuruddha Premalal |
Overview & Objectives | Initial version of Mifos X was not designed to be database agnostic. Goal of this project is to make it so, and test this out in practice by running it locally on Oracle, make sure our test suite runs against Oracle as well as mysql, and well documenting how this can be set up by end-user clients, if they wish to go for this deployment. |
Description | To make this possible, all business logic has to be concentrated in the middle tier with the database being as dumb as possible. This means the platform does not rely on any database specific stored procedures or on the database to generate unique keys. And also application heavily use prepared statements (Spring jdbctemplate) for retrieving data and need to make sure all these queries use full JOIN syntax, and bracket the JOINs so that each join is between a single table and bracketed expression. |
Helpful Skills | SQL, Java |
Impact | MFI with large client base can use the application with Oracle or any other commercial databases. |
Other Resources | Mifos has abstraction from underlying database using: |
Self-contained standalone package, Linux/*ix & Windows Installers, incl. Embedded Database
Mentors | Anuruddha Premalal (plus Michael Vorburger, as needed) |
Overview & Objectives | Primary objective of this project is to build a standalone installer for MifosX platform. Standalone installer is a great way to evaluate and explore MifosX platform quickly. We want:
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Description | Standalone installer will consist of an embeded apache server and a DB. It should also ship with the latest mifosx build war file which should automatically deployed 1. Develop the installer as an executable jar format so that it will support many platforms with JRE. GUI MODE OPTIONS Tomcat Port This is the port at which to run tomcat. COMMAND LINE OPTIONS -mysqlport Use to override the mysql port in the runtime properties file. This sub-project would port / apply our MIFOS-5157 Installer-free simple launcher from classic Mifos to Mifos X, and then look at how to extend such a package to run without any existing external database as planned in MIFOS-4926 (which MIFOS-5157 doesn't cover). The first thought that comes to mind is to achieve this with a pure-Java in-memory database such as H2 or Derby. However, in order to avoid maintaining & supporting 2 different databases for Mifos, we'd like to base this on https://github.com/vorburger/MariaDB4j. While we are at it, we should also replace the classic GPL mysql driver by the LGPL MariaDB Client Library. |
Helpful Skills | SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Web Services, Big Data (Hadoop, Hive) |
Impact | For many microfinance institutions who lack technical skills, installing Mifos X is a burden that prevents them from using this software to more efficiently serve the poor. Often they get lost in the installation process when having to separately install java, their web server, MySQL, and then deploy Mifos. A self-contained package acting as a simple one-step installer for Mifos would help make the software more accessible to more organizations and allow for MFI to more easily test the software and see the immense value it provides. |
Other Resources | https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/OpenMRS+Standalone See Linux Installers wiki page |
Mifos X on "Enterprise Stack" - IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic tests & documentation
Mentors | Michael Vorburger |
Overview & Objectives | Mifos X today is typically used on Tomcat (with Jetty known to work). For a certain class of users, testing it on "Enterprise Stack" application servers (meaning IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic) is desirable - this project would properly test Mifos X on these configurations, make any adaptations to the code which may be required, and produce easy to follow documentation or even small tools helping future users how to go about this. |
Description | This project could be combined with and taken up by the same candidate as the Enterprise database project. |
Helpful Skills | Java, Application Server configuration, WAS classloading crap tricks, documentation writing. Use Cargo, Arquillian etc. for automated testing against WAS & WLS containers? |
Impact | Enable Mifos X to be considered by users wanting it to run (only) on an Enterprise stack
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Other Resources | Vendor pages |
Mifos X SDK
Mentors | Michael Vorburger |
Overview & Objectives | The Mifos X platform as of today is a well structure but monolithic code base - one Git repo, one build, one WAR. This has worked out well for us, but as we grow, it could be interesting to introduce a proper SDK and plug-in concept, allowing contributors to build individual JARs that can be dropped into a certain directory of Mifos X to augment the core platform on well defined extension points and hooks. These modules would be loaded at run-time, not require rebuilding Mifos X, and would remain compatible when a customer upgrades their core platform version. We currently see the SDK as something more relevant to the Java back-end, so in this project you would likely work less on our AngularJS UI (barring some configuration UI for the plug-ins probably); but if you do have any ideas how to make the front-end more modular and extensible as well, we would love to hear from you. |
Description | This project will have three axis/phases: 1. platform infrastructure framework kind of work, based on a very simple or fictitious example extension; 2. identifying the functionally which could require / be sensible to extend in Mifos X, extracting clear and documented Java APIs from it, and then make changes to existing functional platform services to make them extensible by plug-ins; 3. well document this - such plugins will only be written if it's easy and clear how to do this. Note that the more technical part 1. should only take about 1/4 of your project, the focus will have to be putting the "theory" from 1. into "practice" in phases 2. & 3. |
Helpful Skills | Java, modularity, API design, dynamic class loading, OSGi-like concepts (without any plans to actually move Mifos X to running on an OSGi kernel; it's unnecessary complexity, for this) |
Impact | Developers from partnering organisations would be able to more easily extend the core Mifos X by extension code running in-process the platform (as opposed to REST-based |
Other Resources | Many other Java-based platform have such mechanism, and you would be expected to draw at least conceptual, if not outright technical inspiration (re-using code, if feasible) from things like the Eclipse Plug-In architecture (or similar non-OSGi based ones in other IDEs), research if Spring itself or some extension from someone has anything useful for this (think like Guice Multibindings plus ServiceLoader API as discussed on this StackOverflow, or this blog, or these Mycila Guice Extensions; but without going all the way to OSGi-based Spring DM / Dynamic Modules; again, overkill, here), get inspiration from drop-in add-on modules extension capabilities in enterprise software such as e.g. Atlassian plug-in framework, and learn how e.g. our friends at OpenMRS do this (see OpenMRS SDK doc and OpenMRS project). |
Mobile Field Office Planner
Mentors | Sander van der Heyden |
Overview & Objectives | To allow field-based staff to manage their daily schedules and to ensure that their supervisors are able to review these tasks and to plan field operations and bring in more efficiency and transparency for field operations |
Description | Field officers typically have a predefined set of tasks to follow, for example: Do survey for a locality, Conduct Group Trainings, Conduct Group Tests, Do Center Meetings and Collections. Each could have a task code to make operations streamlined. Field officers manage their calendars by selecting an activity and specifying a center, date and time for which this activity is planned. This becomes their planned activity for this slot. A simple workflow to manage each slot – when field officer starts the activity, status of the slot is changed from “new” to “open” and when the activity is completed, it is set to “closed”. It would be ideal to manage this workflow using a mobile tool – preferably an inbound SMS message. For example: an SMS from the field officer’s phone with the text “OPEN 1430” will change the status to “OPEN” of the field officer’s activity that was planned for 2:30pm. Field officer may change his plan up to a certain time prior to the start of the activity. Auditors and branch managers will review the activities and track the field officers’ planning and efficiency. |
Helpful Skills | Java, SQL , Git, SMS integration |
Impact | Field efficiency and operational efficiency |
Other Resources | See SMS Integration and Outbound SMS |
Web-based Ad Hoc Query and Reporting Tool
Mentors | Nayan Ambali |
Overview & Objectives | To run any business successfully, you need the insight of the business and that is possible when you have information system in which you can get the information in the format your business analysis team needs. And in current world business are very much market adaptive and market scenarios changes very rapidly. To cope up with that good MIS need to have Ad-hoc report builder. Easy-to-use, drag-and-drop report designer builds crosstabs, tables, and chart-based reports using a standard browser. |
Description | The ad hoc reporting will be based on a logical mapping of Mifos data elements to business entities (like customer, loan account, savings account, loan transactions, savings transactions etc.) and business attributes (like loan approved date, loan amount, loan outstanding amount etc.). An end user will be able to configure and generate reports based on these business entities and business attributes. Reporting fields and reporting criteria will support basic derived fields like "days overdue", "amount overdue", "customer total outstanding amount", "customer total relationship value" etc. The reporting will support basic functions like summing up totals, sorting based on different fields and grouping based on different fields. |
Helpful Skills | SQL, Pentaho reporting, DW concepts. |
Impact | Business analysis team, funders, management or operational users can get the required data in real time instead of depending on someone to develop reports. Helps in taking quick decisions as data is available immediately. |
Other Resources | http://community.pentaho.com/faq/waqr_faq.php |
Actionable notifications/alerts/status updates in Mifos X
Mentors | Nayan Ambali |
Overview & Objectives | For better usability system needs to have notifications to the logged in user about actions he/she needs to perform in the application.
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Description | Build real time notification system in application to notify to users about pending/new actions she/he needs to take. Example if branch manager login to the application and 3 new loans are created and pending for approval then system should notify him/her about the pending actions. This involves both invoking and triggering these notifications based on these actions or activities as well as the extension of the user interface to support the display of the notifications as well as the ability of the user to take action upon the notifications. |
Helpful Skills | Javascript, CSS, HTML5. AngularJS and Bootstrap (CSS framework) is plus |
Impact | Better usability. improve the productivity of users and actions will be taken on time. |
Other Resources | Usability and Design |
Business Analytics (OLAP)
Mentors | KojoG |
Overview & Objectives | Develop ETL scripts to create OLAP cubes (fact and dimension tables in MySQL). This will allow managers to perform ad hoc slicing and dicing of their data
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Description |
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Helpful Skills | Database Management Systems, MDX, SQL, |
Impact | Data drives a microfinance institution - the more powerful and robust analytical tools management has, the better they can tailor their services and outreach to impact the poor most effectively. |
Other Resources | Saiku Analytics Demo - demo.analytical-labs.com Wikipedia OLAP Article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_test |
Scalability testing, reports, infrastructure for ongoing test, documentation
Mentors | Vishwas Babu A J |
Overview & Objectives | During last year's GSoC 2013, star student (and GSoC 2014 mentor) Anuruddha has greatly contributed to the scalability of the Mifos X by adding server-side pagination and distributed caching to the platform. This project's goal is to measure just how well we really scale - with concrete scenarios and hard numbers, and produce documentation about this helping organization who are evaluating Mifos. Beyond a one time exercise, you should set up infrastructure we can keep using, and integrate the tools you've used into our build chain so that, even after you've gone, help us to keep up good perf. |
Description |
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Helpful Skills | |
Impact | Re-assuring the more Entreprise-y type Mifos clients that they can safely bet on Mifos X as an MFI platform. |
Other Resources | http://twitter.github.io/iago/ http://www.loadui.org (by the good people behind SOAPui) Selenium WebDriver |
UI meta modeling, making screen adaption a configuration instead of coding activity
Mentors | Michael Vorburger |
Overview & Objectives | The AngularJS-based Mifos X UI, like most of today's AngularJS-based or really most web apps, is "coded out" with JavaScript & HTML partial views. This project aims to explore and deliver at least partially working solution, based on and applied to Mifos X UI as a "case study", how web UI of modern SPA web applications can be "modeled" (described), and "generated" (at build, or better, runtime right within the browser). Advantages of such a model driven (MDA / MDD) approach incl. that less technical users can change screen definitions themselves, and that changes to the underlying technical architecture (e.g. AngularJS version and other JS frameworks used) ideally only affect the generators, not the functional screen models. |
Description | You could base this on ongoing explorations in https://github.com/vorburger/MUI.js, and using EFactory / ESON as model syntax (see https://github.com/vorburger/efactory; ESON a JSON-like EMF Xtext technology which is currently being incubated as a formal eclipse.org project). The goal and expected outcome of this project isn't some write up, but actually running code. |
Helpful Skills | Conceptual Modeling, JavaScript, advanced AngularJS, curious and creative mind, capability to actually deliver |
Impact | Enable the Mifos X UI to be much more easily customized and adapted by end-users |
Other Resources | see links above |
Extend Community app to run on Mobile devices with Offline Support
Mentors | Vishwas Babu A J |
Overview & Objectives | MIfos X platform is shipped with a Community-App (SPA) as the default UI which is optimized for Web Browser display on large screens (Mobile, Laptops and Tablets). We need to extend the same to support mobile views (with minor changes to workflow) and provide offline functionality |
Description | Community-App is completely developed on top of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Also since there is a clear separation between the view and the Controllers in Angular JS, we should be able to spin up mobile views fairly easily reusing the same Controllers and Services. As it is quite common for Mobile users to have intermittent data connection, we should also support offline functionality, |
Helpful Skills | Javascript, AngularJS, Apache cordova |
Impact | Field officers can access MifosX from a Mobile optimized view, capture data offline that can be synced back to the server when an internet connection is available. It also becomes easier for the community volunteers to maintain the mobile view ( as we reuse most of the code from the Community app) as opposed to maintaining a separate Android app. |
Other ResourcesOlap Introduction to OLAP - http://www.db-class.org/course/video/preview_list Gentle Introduction to MDX - http://www.iccube.com/support/documentation/mdx_tutorial/gentle_introduction.html |
Client Impact Portal
Mentors | Sander van der Heyden |
Overview & Objectives | Microfinance institutions usually work with various external parties, such as funders or investors. Using the data that is available in MifosX we would like to offer those stakeholders a seperate portal showing accurate and high-level information about the institution that would otherwise be reported manually by the institution. This information helps them in their decision making processes, but also enables them to assess the broader impact they are having with their funding. |
Description | To develop a portal that aggregates information from different Mifos X deployments and report on predefined social and operational metrics Objectives:
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Helpful Skills | SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Web Services |
Impact | Funders and investors are vital for almost all MFI's, providing them with accurate information on the impact they are making with each of their MFI's is something they highly value and that enables them to assess whether they want to further support the MFI's moving forward to enable growth of the MFI. |
Other Resources | Data Analytics & Client Insight - Are we making an impact? (Client Impact Portal demo) |
Web UI quality cross browser non-regression testing
Mentors | Michael Vorburger |
Overview & Objectives | While the Mifos X Community App front-end UI based on AngularJS-based currently does already have some JS unit tests, we lack a full UI level web tests which continually non-regression test common scenarios. We believe having this could add value in terms of quality, including ensuring automated cross browser testing. |
Description | Possibly building upon a extremely limited small scale existing POC (if you find it to be a useful starting point), your mission, should you chose to accept it, would be to build out comprehensive UI walk through scenario test coverage for the Mifos X UI. If you can build more such tests faster and more maintainable (= less code) by using any of the existing frameworks listed below or others you know of / will find, or build useful such infrastructure yourself as part of this code, we're eager to hear from you! Keep in mind that the main deliverable of this project is not (only) a foundation framework, but must actually include an extensive suite of running tests integrated into the Mifos build. |
Helpful Skills | Candidates should demonstrate serious interest and basic know-how by accompanying their application for this project with pull requests to the existing mifosx-ui-selenium-webdriver-tests POC. |
Impact | Continuously verified and cross browser checked quality of the Mifos X UI. |
Other Resources | http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/ https://github.com/vorburger/mifosx-ui-selenium-webdriver-tests https://github.com/vorburger/webdriver-runner https://saucelabs.com or https://browserling.com |
Custom Fantastic Mifos Project
Is there something missing from this ideas list that you want to do? Let us know! Send your project proposal(s) to the developer mailing list.
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