Led by faculty member Janet Davis, students at Whitman College will redevelop the existing BMAC-Warehouse food distribution software for the Blue Mountain Action Council. An NPFI grant has been awarded to Whitman to help Professor Davis teach the 2018-2019 capstone software development course. In this course, a 5-student team will redeploy the existing PHP-based software using a more modern framework such as Ruby on Rails or Django.
During the fall semester, the team will reimplement the detailed requirements implemented in the existing software. This work will also address some fragilities in the existing system that have been encountered by the client and improve the software’s future maintainability and extensibility.
During the spring 2019 semester, the team will extend the system with additional functionality such as managing volunteers, adding new search criteria, and adding features that speed up data entry and improve report generation.
NPFI is excited to support this project because it uniquely exemplifies the idea of redeploying and extending an existing CO-FOSS product using a different development platform. We congratulate Prof. Davis on this work and we look forward to learning about the outcomes of this course at it unfolds.