A number of challenges have been identified with the current OpenLMIS architecture that we hope to address with the re-architecture. The key challenges are:
- Country-level implementation can not modify the look and feel of the UI without forking the code base
- Country-level implementations can not add additional features to OpenLMIS needed for their implementation (such as Tanzania adding the ILS Gateway integration) without forking the code base
- There is not a clear demarcation between code that is central to the system (requires a high level of reliability, high test coverage, should be modified only with the agreement of the community), versus code that is implementation specific and is managed by specific development teams without the need for community involvement. As a result, the current code base is impossible to maintain at a high-level of quality and reliability.
- Creating reports that meet user needs (i.e. beyond the basic capabilities available in Jasper Reports) requires writing code and forking the code base
- Managing merges between the increasing number of implementation project, to try to maintain a single version of OpenLMIS, is time consuming and will become harder/impossible over time
Note that there are many other pain points with the current version of OpenLMIS that will not necessarily prioritized to be addressed by the initial re-architecture.