BCS SPA2015

Software Practice Advancement Conference

SPA Conference session: Hands-on Humanitarian Software

One-line description:Building software for a better world
 
Session format: Long Tutorial 330 mins [read about the different session types]
 
Abstract:In this session, participants implement tickets for a humanitarian open source software project.

Candidate projects are OpenMRS (http://openmrs.org/) and MifosX (http://mifos.org/mifos‐x/). OpenMRS is a system to capture and process medical records and contributes to improving medical care. MifosX is a platform for providing microfinance services and makes financial products available to people without access to conventional commercial banking. Both systems have been set up as open source software and are developed by a large community.

After a brief introduction and setting their development environment, participants spent the better part of four hours building working software for a good cause. The session is fun and mind-opening: whilst coding away (the fun part) people learn about an aspect of software development that is very different from most of our daytime jobs (the mind-opening part).
 
Audience background:As the session is a code jam, the majority of participants should come from an active software development background. The tech stack of both OpenMRS and MifosX is based on Java, Spring, Hibernate and MySQL. BA and QA people are also invited to join the session.
 
Benefits of participating:Participants actively contribute to a humanitarian software project. The session raises awareness that everybody can contribute to a better world by cutting some code. Participants are encouraged to spread the word and run code jams for humanitarian software themselves.
 
Materials provided:- Introductory slides
- Instructions for setting up the development environment
- A list of candidate tickets (stories) to implement
- Experience in running code jams
 
Process:The session starts with an introduction to OpenMRS (or MifosX) from a domain and technical viewpoint.

After setting up their development environment, participants choose a ticket to work on. To facilitate the choice of a topic to work on, the session lead reserves a few tickets for the workshop.

Alternatively, participants can look for a suitable ticket from the respective project themselves. Participants are encouraged to work in pairs.
 
Detailed timetable:00:00 till 00:30 - Introduction to OpenMRS or MifosX
00:30 till 01:00 - Setting up software development environment
01:00 till 01:15 - Break
01:15 till 05:45 - Choosing a ticket and coding away, taking a break whenever required
06:00 till 06:30 - Wrap up
 
Outputs:Completed or half-completed tickets for OpenMRS (or MifosX). Participants encouraged to continue their work for a humanitarian software project of their choice beyond the SPA workshop.
 
History:The session lead has organised and lead several coding jams for OpenMRS in Hamburg and Cologne (Germany), implemented a few tickets for OpenMRS on his own and talked about humanitarian software at conferences.
 
Presenters
1. Wolf Schlegel
ThoughtWorks
2. 3.