OpenLMIS Pain Points

This is a running list of pain points end-users, developers, and implementers experience with the current version of OpenLMIS. 

Developers

• No documentation on how to get OpenLMIS up and running
  • This is true for an implementer.  Developer steps are decently documented
• Insufficient developer documentation
  • Please clarify.  Agree, for example, little guidance on domain, solution design, etc.
• No database documentation
  • What is required?  ERD, for example, is now part of a build job
• Average BA/non-dev type can't get started - hard to install (vs OpenMRS, etc.)
• Scant API & documentation
• Monolithic app tightly coupled with UI: 
  • Not extensible and causes lots of forking/toggling (e.g. new screens)
  • A lot of the variation is in reporting
• No way to contribute without stepping on the toes of others.
• No CI Server/no Continuous Delivery:
  • Update (3/16): We now have Jenkins running to exercise unit tests and DB integration, but functional testing is weak and needs enhancement (e.g. JS tests are not enabled). 
  • Successful build are not being deployed to Demo
• Insufficient test coverage
• Supportability:  inadequate error handling – lots of errors are caught and swallowed; logging is insufficient.
• Older tech stack – Some outdated tools and approaches:
  
  • For those that we want to keep, we need to update to latest/later versions
• Large number of tools & shared libraries that overlap &/or duplicative: Security is a concern and burden
• Poor architectural choices (eg: use of Lombok and approach to exception-handling) 
• Using the APIs requires first doing an interactive login
• No end-user documentation of test cases for manual/regression testing

End-Users

• End-user documentation is lacking; falls to implementor to write it; reference documentation
• No way to provide user feedback
• UI is non-responsive: fails to size and scale, even on large desktop displays
• Poor performance in low-bandwidth environments
  • need baseline metrics!
• Lack of "offline first" design for occasionally connected environments for certain business processes

Implementors

• No user training guide
• No deployment planning tools (e.g. facility list, users/roles, seed data, etc.)
  • Or is this a process/project management toolkit?
• No framework for creating dashboards or reports for a country
  • default reports have insufficient business value; Jasper isn't solving the problem
  • no user-friendly tools for creating custom/ad hoc reports
• No security model or transaction logging to help manage the system –
  • Need updated threat analysis (e.g. penetration testing)
• No way to create country-specific data collection forms (e.g. IVD monthly form) without forking
  • can't create custom screens/tabs to expose and collect custom fields
• Very hard to initially configure the system – 
  • all the seed/reference data for upload configuration is onerous, manual and time-consuming, e.g. master facility list, or the ability to pull in from DHIS2
• No way to add additional features needed for a country implementation without forking the code
• No auto-update/upgrade/migration process
  
  • e.g. security updates