Architectural discussion with Mifos and ThoughtWorks folks on April 27th, 2010.

Brainstorm

• reduce build time
  • focus on speeding up integration tests
  • aim for 90% unit tests, 9% integration tests, 1% acceptance/functional tests
  • remove unnecessary tests
  • build pipelining
• transaction support
  • use Spring-managed transactions
  • remove commits and explicit session control
  • remove StaticHibernateUtil
  • use AOP in application context configuration for transaction management instead of annotations
• i18n and L10n
  • remove all L10n code from domain
  • use out-of-the-box i18n mechanism
• separate presentation from domain
• service identification
• convention of patterns for services
  • calling convention(s)
  • when/how DTOs are constructed and used
• migrate from Struts to SpringMVC
• new frontend: Grails?
• modularization along functional lines (also see EvolvingTheMifosCodeBase)
• 24x7 availability
  • reduce exclusivity of batch jobs and OLTP activities
• move to Spring security
• surveys/PPI as a separate module
• customizable/business-driven workflow

Goals

Vision

• do whatever gives us the largest ROI
• align goals with customer commitments

Prioritized Goals

1. frequent releases
2. easy to develop/maintain
3. feature-driven releases