Google Code-In

Owned by Ed Cable
Last updated: Nov 28, 2017
15 min read

Get Stoked - End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.

The Mifos Initiative is one of the 25 mentoring organizations for Google Code-In 2017 - join us in fighting poverty with financial inclusion!

Mifos Participation in GCI

2016

2014

2016 Google Code-In (GCI) - Get to Know Mifos

After participating in Google Summer of Code in five different summers and GCI in 2014 we look forward to the opportunity to work with pre-university students through Google Code-In. As both a 501(c)3 non-profit and an open source project, our global community has a diverse range of tasks (both technical and non-technical) that will be a valuable experience for the students. Students will gain exposure to an active open source project, a widespread global community, and expand upon a wide range of discipline as they use technology to help alleviate global poverty.

Students in 2016 will have the option to work on a variety of projects related to the back-end Apache Fineract platform, our front-end Web App built on top of the AngularJS framework, and a suite of mobile apps including our Android field officer app and Android client self-service banking app. 

Get Excited!

Watch the following videos to learn about our gigantic mission and the game-changing platform we've built to achieve it. 

http://youtu.be/co5cK2cYVU0

Useful Resources

GCI students will have the opportunity to work on the following types of tasks:

  1. Code: we have a range of introductory coding tasks across our Java platform, AngularJS community app, and Android field officer and client self-service apps 
    1. Platform - Apache Fineract: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Mailing List
    2. Web App - Mifos X: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Mailing List | Gitter Chatroom
    3. Mobile App - Android Field Officer App: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom
    4. Client App - Android Self-Service App: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom
  2. Documentation/Training: Most of the end users of our software aren't super-technical. Documentation is critical - we have a number of short how-to guides, training slides, and video tutorial to work on for using the software and engaging with the community. 
    1. Fineract Wiki: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/
    2. Mifos X User Manual: User Manual
  3. Outreach/Research: As a global non-profit with a rich social mission to bring financial services to the poor, we have an enormous amount of non-coding work to get done in our community - on the marketing front this involves product positioning and collateral, donor and volunteer outreach, social media management, CRM & contact management, digital media design, as well as analysis and research of our competitors and new financial inclusion products and services. 
  4. Quality Assurance: Mifos X is enterprise-grade, mission-critical software to run a bank - quality, security, and performance couldn't be more important - as our software continues to grow, we have a range of manual and automate testing tasks.
  5. User Interface: Since many end users of our software aren't that technically literate, an optimal user experience is ever more valuable, various areas of our web and mobile apps could use some mockups and wireframes.


Example Tasks

Coding

Task: Insert Correct Labels for “Add Client Identifier” page

Within the Mifos X Web App (Community App), the labels for adding a client identifier are incorrect. To reproduce, navigate to any client, click Identities and then +Add. The labels for the first two input fields are incorrect. The first one reads “Status” and should be “Document Type”. The second reads “label.input.status” and should be “Document Status”

You can test this out at https://demo.openmf.org (mifos/password). This can be changed by updating the Mifos X Web App (Community App) with source code located at https://github.com/openMF/community-app. Please reference this Getting Started Guide to familiarize with the codebase.

See  MIFOSX-2753 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for a screenshot.

Tags: Javascript, AngularJS, UI, Web App, Community App 

Task: Add Proper Field so "Edit Weekly Charges" Functionality Works Properly 

Within the Mifos X Web App, it's not possible to edit an existing weekly charge due to a required input field of "Repeats every" being missing. The steps to reproduce are as such

  1. Create savings account with weekly charge, 
  2. Click on submit, to submit new savings application.
  3. Click on Undo approval, 
  4. In the modification savings page, for weekly charge - Repeats every field is not available. 

What is expected is that the "Repeats Every" field should be displayed. See MIFOSX-2557 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for details and screenshot. Expected:- 

You can test this out at https://demo.openmf.org (mifos/password). This can be changed by updating the Mifos X Web App (Community App) with source code located at https://github.com/openMF/community-app. Please reference this Getting Started Guide to familiarize with the codebase.

Tags: Javascript, AngularJS, UI

Task: Only Allow Active Groups to Be Associated with Centers

Currently in the Mifos X Web App (community app) when attempting to search for new groups to associate with a center, it is displaying in the auto-populated search, closed and pending groups, Ideally it should allow only active groups to get associated under Centers (While creating center or though manage groups for centers).  See  MIFOSX-2792 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for more details

You can test this out at https://demo.openmf.org (mifos/password). This can be changed by updating the Mifos X Web App (Community App) with source code located at https://github.com/openMF/community-app. Please reference this Getting Started Guide to familiarize with the codebase.


Tags: AngularJS, Java, Javascript

Task: Fix Localization issues with typos and bad grammar in message strings

In several of the message strings available for translation, there are both typos and grammatical mistakes which need to be addressed. The listing strings can be found at https://github.com/openMF/community-app/labels/TranslateWiki. Pull requests can be made for each separate commit. 

You can test this out at https://demo.openmf.org (mifos/password). This can be changed by updating the Mifos X Web App (Community App) with source code located at https://github.com/openMF/community-app. Please reference this Getting Started Guide to familiarize with the codebase.

Tags: AngularJS, Java, Javascript

Task: Properly align the client and group lists on Bulk Reassignment Page

In the recently re-skinned Mifos X Web App (Community App), the Client and Group lists on the Bulk Loan Reassignment page are mis-aligned. Please fix the columns so they're aligned not extending beyond the margin. 

See https://github.com/openMF/community-app/issues/1625 for screenshot and details. 

You can test this out at https://demo.openmf.org/beta (mifos/password). This can be changed by updating the Mifos X Web App (Community App) with source code located at https://github.com/openMF/community-app. Please reference this Getting Started Guide to familiarize with the codebase.

Tags: AngularJS, Java, Javascript

Documentation/Training

Task: User Documentation for Offline Functionality in Android Field Operations App

During the past Google Summer of Code program, Rajan Maurya, built in significant new offline functionality within the Android field operations app. Based on the functional specifications and testing out the mobile app, you should add a section to our wiki for the end user documentation to outline how a user will go back and forth between online and offline mode, how they can download clients, groups, and centers prior to going offline, how to view this data while offline, and how they can synchronize this data when they have an online data connection once more.  Documentation will be added to the Confluence Wiki on MifosForge. Source code and technical documentation can be found at https://github.com/openMF/android-client

Tags: Documentation, Android, Mobile, Offline

Task: Create Screencast to Demo Basic Features of Android Field Officer App

During the past Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs have implemented a brand new Material Design for our Android field officer app. This new design is a significant improvement which we'd like to showcase to our community via a screencast demonstration that covers the basic functionality of the application including logging in, navigation amongst clients, groups, and centers, viewing account details, and conducting transactions. Demo video should be no more than 2 minutes long. You can hook up your phone via a data cable to your PC and then based on your environment, we'll recommend a program to record the screencast.Source code and technical documentation can be found at https://github.com/openMF/android-client

Tags: Videos, Android, Mobile, Screencast

Task: Document the Address Module 

As a part of Credit bureau Integration project, address module has been added to enable users to add address for clients. You need to understand the address module and document its usage and configuration steps.

The initial requirement documents can be found here :Address Module requirements.  The JIRA ticket  :Fineract Jira for Address module documentation for the task



Task: Document Standard Reports in Mifos X with examples

Mifos X ships with a number of standard default reports representing the most commonly request, loan, client, accounting, and funds reports. We need to provide a short description of each report, the audience it's directed at, a list of the fields in the report, its available formats, and selectable parameters. For the task, you will run each report in our demo server, generate it as a PDF to upload to our wiki as an example, and add the descriptive details in the table found at Standard Reports Field Descriptions. 

Tags:  Pentaho, Business Intelligence, Reporting, MySQL, Documentation, Confluence

Task: Create Set of Training Slides for Mifos Shares & Dividend Accounts

To assist our customers in using the Mifos X web app, we want to provide a set of training slides based off of our existing documentation. Training Slides should provide step by step instructions along with relevant screenshots from the application. Training slides should be created as a Google Slides presentation. This set of training slides should cover the following:

  • How to Create a New Share Product
  • How to Create New Shares Account
  • How to Issue Dividends

Use the following documentation at Share products and Dividends and the Demo Server (https://demo.openmf.org) with credentials mifos/password to configure. 

Tags:  Documentation, Training, Shares, Dividends, Users

Task: Verify links in Wiki User Manual for Mifos X Web App are Accurate

Over time as we move pages around on our wiki and add new functionality, links get broken or outdated. To ensure our User Manual is up to date and accurate we must go through and verify the links. You should navigate to the beginning of the user manual and attempt to traverse through it testing each link. Note the broken links you find and update them if you are able to. You can also use a broken link checker tool for your respective browser. More details on this issue can be found at MXD-34 - Getting issue details... STATUS  

Tags:  Documentation, User Manual, Confluence, Wiki

User Interface

Task: Design Landing Page for Android Self-Service App

Now that we have self-service APIs in place, a number of community members are building out self-service application and mobile wallets. We are building out a reference self-service Android app to allow clients to directly interact with their bank accounts. We would like to provide some reference wireframes and mockups to guide our developers based off of this user stories that have been drafted. This task involves creating a wireframe mockup in Balsamiq (using an account provided by Mifos) for the main landing page when a user initially logs in - it should display their name, summary of accounts, any notifications, and major actions that can be taken.  You can reference the user stories at https://goo.gl/7mBZBF


A helpful resource and guideline for the design is the slide deck from CGAP outlining the 21 principles of of design of smartphone interfaces for mobile money - http://www.cgap.org/blog/power-smartphone-interfaces-mobile-money

Tags: UI, Wireframes, Mobile Money, Mobile Wallets, Smartphone, Human-Centered Design, Android, Self-Service

Task: Design Wireframe for Mifos Partner Directory Profile

Our Mifos.org Partner Directory is a vital tool to help financial institutions wanting to use Mifos X to find a local partner to provide support. Our current directory is powered by the Sabai Directory Wordpress Plugin. We need to improve the usability of the directory by improving the layout of the directory search results and the layout of the profile itself. This task involves creating a wireframe mockup of both the search results and the directory profile. See http://mifos.org/directory/listing/sky-labs for a sample listing. You will use the online tool, Balsamiq, for creating the wireframe.

Tags: UI, Wireframes, Wordpress, Directory, UX, Balsamiq

Task: Design Wireframe for Ability to Search for Merchants in a Mobile Wallet 

Now that we have self-service APIs in place, a number of community members are building out self-service application and mobile wallets. We would like to provide reference designs and mockups as guidelines for mobile wallets. This task involves creating a wireframe mockup in Balsamiq (using an account provided by Mifos) for the mobile wallet interface for searching for merchants to make a mobile or electronic payment to. A user should be able to go into the application and either search for merchants by name, list by category, or display across a map. For examples, see http://novopay.in/

A helpful resource and guideline for the design is the slide deck from CGAP outlining the 21 principles of of design of smartphone interfaces for mobile money - http://www.cgap.org/blog/power-smartphone-interfaces-mobile-money

Tags: UI, Wireframes, Mobile Money, Mobile Wallets, Smartphone, Human-Centered Design, Android

Task: Design a landing page for our Mifos Chapters.

We have recently launched a network of local Mifos Chapters. We would like to do a high-fidelity design of the landing page to navigate to the respective local chapters. This design should incorporate a global map and the ability to click to the respective chapter website based on the city where they’re located. Here is an example chapter website: http://nairobi.mifos.org/. This should be capable of being implemented in Wordpress.  See http://plusacumen.org/ and the Global Chapter Network map for a design we’d be interested in emulating.

Tags: UI, Wordpress, Web Design, HTML5, Balsamiq

Task: Redesign our Donation Page

Our current Donate Now page on Mifos.org is a simple link to a Paypal button. We need to design the donate now and confirmation page to have a better user experience including communicating our mission and impact better along with additional calls to action and the ability to share with friends. Design would include both the main page and the sidebar navigation. You can follow best practices for designing donation pages to assist you. You can create wireframes and actuallly implement the design using the template engine on our Wordpress site. See for http://mifos.org/take-action/donate/ for our current page. 

Tags: Design, Balsamiq, Wordpress, Online Donations

Outreach/Research

Task: Draft Market Research Brief on Financial Inclusion Sector in Peru 

With more than 2 billion unbanked worldwide still in need of financial services, our community is continuing to push into new regions and countries. Understanding the size, landscape, and needs of a country is vital information before our community can begin to grow there. For this task, you will be responsible for drafting a brief market research report in a Google Doc for the financial inclusion sector of the assigned country, addressing the following points. The report should contain summarized findings as well as links to relevant source material. 

Financial Inclusion Sector

  • What is the unbanked population in Brazil? What is the underbanked population?

  • Who delivers financial inclusion?

  • What are the types of organizations? MFIs? Banks? Co-operatives?

  • How many are there? What sizes are they?

  • What role do banks play?

Financial Products & Services

  • What operational methodologies are practiced?

  • What are the main products and services offered?

  • How closely do they align with the current functionalities of our platform?

Market Influencers

Who are the Influencers?

  • Associations

  • APEX organizations

  • Government/regulators.

  • Major NGOs

What are major events to attend?

Tags: Research, Community Development, Latin America, Due Diligence, Financial Inclusion, Peru


Task: Write a new "How Mifos is Used" page for Mifos.org Optimize our HootSuite Account for Cross-Posting and Social Media Listening


To illustrate to prospective users of our software, how it works and what the solution actually does, it's nice to provide a mini-case study of how it's used as a back-office software for a banking or a digital banking platform. We haven't created this page on our newer Mifos.org website and would like to write an updated page similar to our old one at http://mifosx.openmf.org/Mifos%20website/mifos.org/about/how-mifos-used.html You should first familiarize with the software and then explain how it's used on a daily basis. This will be posted on our Wordpress website and should include images or screenshots as well.  


Tags: Web Design, Writing, Wordpress, Community Management, Social Networks, Marketing, Outreach

Task: Optimize our HootSuite Account for Cross-Posting and Social Media Listening

Over the past year, we've begun to use social media more actively across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We currently use Hootsuite for posting updates to Twitter. We haven’t yet configured it to post to our other social networks – Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn. We would also like to take better advantage of using HootSuite to respond and engage with our community and other relevant communities via Social Media. This task would involve configuring our HootSuite account for crossposting to other social media networks as well as setting up lists and alerts for better social media listening. For social media listening, we would like to track mentions and chatter around Mifos but also identify and engage with influential people in the financial inclusion, social entrepreneurship, ICT4D, and open source sectors.

Tags: Social Media, Hootsuite, Twitter, Facebook, Community Management, Social Networks, LinkedIn

Task: Design the t-shirt for our Mifos Summit

Each year we hold an annual conference and give out a new t-shirt to community members. We also give the shirts out to our volunteers throughout the year since this is one of our biggest incentives a developer could get :) The design of the t-shirt should have both a tech feel as well as some of the warmth of a non-profit to it. We'd like to do the t-shirt on a dark or blue background so a lighter single color design is preferable. Deliverable for this would be a high-res illustrator or photoshop file of the design. For this task, you would have the freedom to design what you want but it should communicate across collaboration, community, empowerment, financial inclusion, solidarity, innovation, technology. working on a common platform, unity, peer support., diversity given our community is completely global, flexibility and freedom of open source. It could tie in elements of technology like software code/bits and bytes, mobile phones, cloud computing. It could tie in elements of microfinance like different forms of currency, villages, microbusinesses like farming, artisanry, etc.

Tags: Graphic Design, Volunteers, Outreach, Community Management

Task: Update Mifos Events/Conferences Calendar

Mifos sits at the crossroads of a number of different industries – financial inclusion and microfinance, mobile banking, financial services, cloud computing, open source technology, HFOSS (Humianitarian Free and Open Source Software). We attend events regularly to promote our mission, educate about our technology and identify new volunteers, customers, donors, and partners.  Having a comprehensive and up-to-date calendar is important for our staff to plan out what events to attend as well as to inform our community of events  they can attend. Internally, we track these events via a Google Sheet and also publicize the ones relevant to the community on our public community calendar.

This task would involve updating our current calendar with the dates/times for events that we’ve followed or participated  in during the past as well as researching and adding new events to our calendar. 

Tags: Events, Community Management, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Research

Task: Research our Major Competitors and Complete Matrix on Financial Inclusion Technology Providers

There are a number of different software solutions available to manage the operations of a financial institution serving the poor. We track our competition so we can be aware of new trends and latest innovation as well as help to inform our partners and their respective business development strategies in their markets.

    • Competitors to research: Mambu, Oradian, OpenCBS, Temenos, Bankers Realm, Loan Performer
    • Comparison Areas
      • Functional Depth
        • Loan Products Supported
        • Savings Products Supported
        • Insurance Products Supported
        • Payments Products Supported
      • Mobile Delivery & Enablement
        • Mobile Money Integration
        • Mobile Application
      • Technology
        • Deployment Environment
        • Hosted offering?
        • Technology Stack (language, database, etc.)
        • APIs available
        • Offline Access
      • Business Development Model
        • Support
        • Partner Network
        • Pricing Model
      • Basic Company Info
        • Total Customers & Clients Reached
        • Market & Product Positioning
        • Countries/Geographies of Focus
        • Date of Latest Release
        • Annual Revenue
        • Size of Company
        • Recent Major News

Tags: Research, Competitor Analysis, Business Development, Google Sheets, Due Diligence, Finance, Support Models

Quality Assurance

Task: Automated Testing of Mifos Android Self-Service App  (Unit Tests)

This task involves coding of Functional and Instrumentation tests (Unit Tests) for the latest Android Self-Service App. Since it is a fresh code with no prior tests in place, this would be an awesome opportunity for the intern to learn Testing of an Android App using Instrumentation Test Runner on Android inside out. This would be an ideal task for Google Code in students as the tests have to be written with a certain pattern, therefore no prior knowledge about Mifos wouldn't be a major blocker.  

Source code for self-service app can be found at https://github.com/openMF/self-service-app

Tags : Android, Java, Unit Tests, Testing, Git

Task: Do manual regression testing loans functionality Android Field Officer App

Major new functionalities have recently going into our Android Field Officer application and prior to releasing this via the Google Play store, we need to manually test the application to ensure there are no regressions. This task is focused on the loans module in the Android field officer app and you can follow our user manual for how functionality should work: Working with Loan Accounts

Tags: QA, Android, Regression Testing

Task: Set up integration tests for Shares APIs via Rest Assured

All functionality in the Apache Fineract platform is exposed through RESTful APIs so that third parties can easily build new applications and solutions on top of the platform. We need to build out and expand our integration test suite for our Java APIs using Rest Assured . Rest Assured makes Testing and validating REST services in Java as simple as doing it for dynamic languages such as Ruby and Groovy. This tasks involves setting up the integration tests for our Shares APIs - https://demo.openmf.org/api-docs/apiLive.htm#shareaccounts

Tags: Java (JUnit, Rest Assured), Git, QA, Testing

Task: Set up integration tests for SPM (Surveys Framework) APIs via Rest Assured

All functionality in the Apache Fineract platform is exposed through RESTful APIs so that third parties can easily build new applications and solutions on top of the platform. We need to build out and expand our integration test suite for our Java APIs using Rest Assured . Rest Assured makes Testing and validating REST services in Java as simple as doing it for dynamic languages such as Ruby and Groovy. This tasks involves setting up the integration tests for our SPM (Surveys Framework) APIs - https://demo.openmf.org/api-docs/apiLive.htm#surveys

Tags: Java (JUnit, Rest Assured), Git, QA, Testing

Task: Set up integration tests for Self-Service APIs via Rest Assured

All functionality in the Apache Fineract platform is exposed through RESTful APIs so that third parties can easily build new applications and solutions on top of the platform. We need to build out and expand our integration test suite for our Java APIs using Rest Assured . Rest Assured makes Testing and validating REST services in Java as simple as doing it for dynamic languages such as Ruby and Groovy. This tasks involves setting up the integration tests for our Self-Service APIs which can be found at https://demo.openmf.org/api-docs/apiLive.htm#selfbasicauth


Tags: Java (JUnit, Rest Assured), Git, QA, Testing







Timeline

Official GCI Timeline

See also