Binny, > Are we concentrating too much on technical improvements while not paying > adequate attention to new/improved features?
Yes, this is the whole point of this email chain. I was asking for input/feedback from the users about what to put into mifos after Maya G. So far only george has offered some insight into what might be useful going forward. From a technical point of view we know what we need to do but theres no point in taking on that investment unless customers out there want further features/improvements etc regards, Keith. On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Binny Gopinath <[email protected]> wrote: > > Are we concentrating too much on technical improvements while not paying > adequate attention to new/improved features? > > Technical improvements without any visible improvement to end-users - may > cause users to consider moving away from Mifos. I would like releases to be > a mix of new/improved functional features + a bunch of technical > improvements. I have had the chance to get a glimpse into some of our > competition and very soon our feature set is going to be insufficient, which > is heartbreaking .. > > On technical improvements: > - would be good to include testing/handling of larger volumes - I have had a > couple of enquiries from large MFI's - one of them has 4+ million members > - on i18n, would be good to allow overriding of specific internationalized > labels look up from config folders - so that they do not get overwritten by > any upgrades. And also handle date formats consistently, especially in > reports. > > Thanks > Binny > > > On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Van Mittal-Henkle > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> George, >> >> I'm catching up on some of these threads after being out for a few days >> >> > - there's a mobile revolution underway in sub-Saharan Africa; building >> > both the APIs/hooks for connecting into a variety of mobile systems >> > (from mobile money to mobile interfaces for clients and MFI staff to >> > exchange of info with other systems that are running mobile apps) and >> > also potentially getting a few sample/reference mobile apps running on >> > Mifos (need to vet specific pain points so we don't build something >> > just for the sake of building it) >> >> If Mifos provided Restful or WSDL based APIs it would open up lots of >> possibilities for building on Mifos for things like this. Having stable >> APIs for people to build on is one of the things we have been working >> towards for some time. A lot of KeithW's efforts in particular have >> been around getting internals to a state where we could start layering >> an API on them. As mentioned, getting specific customers with specific >> use cases to drive this is key. >> >> > also for you and the other engineers who have worked on MIfos: in a >> > community model if there's less oversight, is there under-the-covers >> > work that should be prioritized which will help keep Mifos stable and >> > scalable as it goes forward in the community? >> >> Here's where some big questions come up. >> >> One hypothesis is that there are two classes of Mifos users-- Class 1: >> larger MFIs who have a need for various extensions and customizations of >> Mifos and who can take on some expense to do that and even host their >> own infrastructure and Class 2: smaller MFIs who could likely manage >> with fewer features and less extensibility and who would benefit most >> from low cost hosted access to Mifos. >> >> How to most effectively meet the needs of both users is tricky. >> >> We've been challenged by the current code base being difficult and >> expensive to extend and maintain. We have made progress in improving >> the code and certain areas of it are much easier to deal with now. >> However, there is still a large amount of code left that needs >> improvement. >> >> The most cost effective way to deliver a solution that can be >> effectively hosted at very low cost (supporting multi-tenancy for >> example) at this point looks like a rewrite that would pull in reusable >> parts of Mifos but redo the basics from the ground up to get things like >> multi-tenancy, transaction management, auditing, clean i18n, layered >> architecture, separation of concerns and manageable tests in place. To >> keep the cost of doing a rewrite low, it would help for the target >> release to have fewer features and options than Mifos currently does. >> >> On the other hand, supporting larger existing and new MFIs and those >> requiring the larger feature set currently supported by Mifos would >> benefit from the current code base being extended and refined. The >> difficulty here is that the cost to continue maintaining the current >> code is high as is the cost to refactor and improve it. >> >> Keith and I are in agreement on the things that he already laid out >> here: >> http://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/MIFOS/Technical+Roadmap+%28Post+ >> Maya+G+and+onwards%29 >> >> This is a good list of how the current code base could be moved forward. >> >> >> Replacing the current Struts/JSP based UI code with Spring/Freemarker is >> the biggest single enabler for lowering the cost of maintaining and >> extending Mifos. It leads to: >> * API creation across the application (by achieving complete separation >> of business logic from presentation code) >> * simplified transaction management >> * simplified i18n >> * improvement of layered architecture >> * reduction and simplification of test code >> >> --Van >> >> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. > Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security > threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes > sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2 > _______________________________________________ > Mifos-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-users > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2 _______________________________________________ Mifos-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-users
