Question

The major factors which will cause the unsuccessful of Sahana software project in offering an effective timely access to comprehensive ,relevant and reliable information for humanitarian operations today are:

1. Sahana Foundation is an well known successful organisation in terms of its reliability and stability, but always in the corporate world and in public sector, stakeholders usually prefer real time testing for its performance. It's very difficult to adapt an untested system in the changing environment, since SAHANA is free & open source software, the developers don't feel any responsibility or any sort of obligation in case of software issues. This plays devastating role when it comes to local maintenance ability and downstream troubleshooting scenarios.

2. The Sahana project works for a global community and hence it needs stability and consistency in its working.This is difficult to maintain this as it has no fixed owner institution/s.The changing institutions have a negative impact its steady working and development.

3. In the workflow & structure of Sahana it's very important to deal with the quality of data imported. Since the data that has been fetched, are gathered by individuals or various organisation who didn't use Sahana, because of this it's quite challenging to process the data before executing. To uplift this type of cases, there must be a support system to provide smooth functionality and to facilitate the quality of imported data.

4. One of the biggest challenge for Sahana is security issues. Sometimes, if the ISP(Internet Service Provider) itself is a victim of a cyber-attack and troubled with power failures, then the remote server pings won't be accessible over the internet. Because of this, it is impossible for other to access the network since it targets the domain with network ping to congest the internet via a distributed multitude of servers.

5. The people who use the Sahana platform are different from the people who actually develop it.The users of the software might not be understand or use the new features added by the developers which will make the promotion of Sahana difficult.Hence the software should have more user friendly interface so that even a layman in technology can use it.

6. Some features of the software like messaging and situation control may need real time response

Agile techniques vary in practices and emphasis in software engineering. However, they share common characteristics, including iterative development and a focus on interaction, communication, and the reduction of resource-intensive intermediate artifacts. There are seven methods reported in a book chapter of Advances in Computers [3], i.e.

1. Extreme programming

2. Scrum

3. The crystal methods

4. Feature driven development

5. Lean development

6. Dynamic systems development method

7. Agile modelling

How could any listed TWO (2) methods assist in designing and developing a new enhanced version of Sahana [2]?

Answer 1

The enhanced version of Sahana can be build by using methods such as Agile Modeling and Feature-Driven Development. As first, the modules which need to be featured by Sahana needs to be fixed. Through the use of Agile Modeling, which follows iterative development, needs to be implemented. As the process needs to build in such a way of the changes are required during the initial phase after testing, or to satisfy the consumers, the whole process need not be started again. To make Sahana software reliable, stable, secure and to provide real-time testing features, a certain standard of input of features that need to be given to the software must be finalized by the organization.

As listed that Sahana is free and open-source software, but needs continuous development to support the data to be processed by the software and provide effective results. Through Feature-Driven development, by deciding the essential factors which need to be developed first by prioritizing the need for the complete framework. The few factors can be User-friendly UI design, the functionality it provides and the standardized input data, which can be easily processed by the system.