Best Practices
Identify Team Members
It is important to identify everyone working on the project.
Define Roles and Responsibilities
Once the team members have been identified, they can be assigned roles on the project. On OpenMRS projects, team members may fill multiple roles. T
he roles assigned may include:
Project Stakeholders
Subject Matter (domain) Experts
Project Manager
Business Analyst
Software Developer
Software Tester
Hold a kickoff meeting
If possible, it is effective to have everyone on one call to discuss the previously defined roles and responsibilities, project vision and to get everyone’s opinion on scope and schedule.
Define Scope/Schedule
It is important to define the following:
Business need: What problem is being solved?
Project Objectives: How is it being solved?
Scope: What is being delivered?
Key Milestones: How to measure progress?
Schedule: What timeline is expected?
Communication Strategy
The above items should be documented in a plan with the following:
How/what tools should be used to provide updates?
What information to be provided in updates
How often should updates be given?
How often should meetings be held?
Project Plan
The above items should be documented in a plan with the following:
Scope
Targeted Schedule
Roles/Responsibilities
Communication Strategy
Posting projects to Talk
Answering these questions while announcing the start of a project will help communicate its needs and goals:
What is the project?
What problems is this project trying to solve?
Who's doing it?
What's the timeframe?
- Here's how to get involved!
Start Your Own Project
We've listed many idea for projects in the pages above, but we're more than happy to entertain other ideas if you've got 'em. The OpenMRS framework allows any developer to explore creative modifications of OpenMRS through our module API, using Spring's AOP. With modules, any developer can create a hot-swappable "plugin" for OpenMRS akin to Mozilla's add-ins.
- We encourage module developers to save their code within our subversion repository.
- Modules are delivered to implementers through the Module Repository
To create a new project, either email the developer's list with your idea or copy the New Project Template into the Unassigned Projects section.
Non-Coders
Are you interested in OpenMRS and have ideas for potential projects/improvements that are not listed here? We would love to hear about them. Want to translate OpenMRS into another language? Or help with testing/mocking a new user interface design?
Please consider joining our implementers mailing list to talk with other users, and share experiences or ideas. Take a look at the contribution page for more details.