Get Stoked - End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.
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| Mentors | James Dailey |
| Overview & Objectives | |
| Description | This project is a continuation of the initial PayGoSol foundation that was led by 2014 GSOC intern, Antonio Carella.
Work in 2015 will include adding the following features to make it an out-of-the-box solution that any PAYG hardware provider could use:
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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 | Mifos Android Client on MifosX
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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 |
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 | https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page https://code.google.com/p/zaproxy/ Run FindBugs & related tools for some serious static code analysis |
Scaling MifosX to serve 2 million+ customer accounts
| Mentors | Vishwas Babu A J |
| Overview & Objectives | This project's goal is to create an Amazon Cloud formation template for Mifos deployments at large Organisations. We would measure how we scale, with concrete scenarios and hard numbers, and produce documentation about this helping organization who are evaluating Mifos. We would also try to identify and fix performance bottlenecks in the MifosX and the community app codebase |
| Description | You would be creating a Cloud formation template on AWS for a sample high performance Mifos setup. The setup would include
You would then use Jmeter (or a tool of your choice) to create realistic data and run and benchmark performance on this setup. Based on the figures, we would make fixes to either to the MifosX / Community app codebases to fix any identified performance bottlenecks and then carry out multiple iterations of tweaking the Cloud formation template to achieve best performance. |
| Helpful Skills | Must be a self starter, Experience with Amazon AWS and any opensource load testing tool is helpful |
| 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 |
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| 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: |
Mifos X on "Enterprise Stack" - IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic tests & documentation
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POC of a Scalable MifosX deployment on Openstack
| Mentors | Vishwas Babu A J |
| 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 | Markus Geiss (Deactivated) |
| 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). |
POC of a Scalable MifosX deployment on Openstack
| Mentors | |
| Overview & Objectives | Create a POC of a scalable MifosX implementation (with load balanced tomcats and percona servers) on an openstack setup on a public cloud. Also publish a whitepaper with details of Openstack setup |
| Description | Mifosx was built to be cloud ready from the ground up. One of the most popular deployment environments for MifosX has been on Amazon EC2, however due to country specific regulation, many implementors are forced to consider in-house deployments The aim of this project is two-fold Propose a scalable deployment model for Mifos, which includes
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| Helpful Skills | Unix, OpenStack, experience with any public cloud (AWS etc) and Percona Server is a plus |
| Impact | Improves deployment options for Mifos. Would be very helpful for specialists in African countries who deal with strict regulatory controls in hosting data outside their region |
| Other Resources | Saiku Analytics Demo - demo.analytical-labs.comCreate a POC of a scalable MifosX implementation (with load balanced tomcats and percona servers) on an openstack setup on a public cloud. Also publish a whitepaper with details of Openstack setup |
| Description | Mifosx was built to be cloud ready from the ground up. One of the most popular deployment environments for MifosX has been on Amazon EC2, however due to country specific regulation, many implementors are forced to seek alternative models that can scale as effectively The aim of this project is two-fold
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| Helpful Skills | Unix, OpenStack, experience with any public cloud (AWS etc) and Percona Server is a plus |
| Impact | Improves deployment options for Mifos. Would be very helpful for specialists in African countries who deal with strict regulatory controls in hosting data outside their region |
| Other Resources | Openstack: https://www.openstack.org/ |
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 | Markus Geiss (Deactivated) |
| 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). |
TENTATIVE: Automation of Conversion of AngularJS Community App into Chrome App
| 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 | Vishwas Babu A J & Markus Geiss (Deactivated) |
| 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
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TENTATIVE: 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 |
TENTATIVE: 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 |
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