Survey Results - 2021 August

We asked the Dev@fineract.apache.org list to respond to an online survey.  The survey asked many of the same questions as the Survey Results of 2019 November. 

Response n = 41, with each questions receiving up to 41 responses, but some as few as 28 responses.  

GENERAL QUESTIONS

Note post survey: See history of the project, i.e. Mifos Initiative was involved in incubating the project at Apache, and the core software was previously released as MifosX.  Mifos Initiative has been the creator of a community of developers from 2002 to present. 

Implementors, Integrators, Institutional Users (n = 36) 

(if you answered yes or yes to "dev/test", then this section was presented to you.) 

FEEDBACK SECTION  (every survey taker was taken to this section) 

N=41 

Thereafter we asked for some specific ideas.  These ideas and comments were shared:   

• Make APIs super easy to consume instead of making bloated feature rich APIs. Non techfins have slow developers and it takes them forever to integrate front-end applications into the platform.
• The Apache Fineract website and the Getting Started Guide need a lot of work. As an example, the first thing the Getting Started guide does is confuse users and prompt questions: It says it is "for Fineract 1.x (non-CN)". What does that mean? Am I in the right place? What is non-CN? Does this apply to me? 1.x? Is there a later version of Fineract? Presumabley CN stands for Cloud-Native. Surely cloud native is better. But where is it? Help! My point is that there is too much of a cognitive load when you come into the documentation. In fact I have learned so much more from lurking on the Listserv, and I must commend the friendly community.
  
  
• New features implementations are not happening regularly.
  
  
• Maybe some tutorial videos would be great for the less experienced community (I don't know if they already exist)
  
  
• involve much more the internet of things
  
  
• User manuals for personnel without financial knowledge.
  
  
• Have a CI/CD with Quality Assurance and Rlease Tag in the Source Code Repositories form more focused work teams (front back end) to streamline development
  
  
• Requires more mentors.
  
  
• reduce the number of segments and concentrate on a major version which will make the use-cases much straight forward
  
  
• Enable mobile payments, sms & email
• Fineract CN architecture is too complex for proper contributing
  
  
• Documentation is scattered and use cases other than micro-finance need to be highlighted. There is hardly a senior functional fintech influencer connected to the project at Product engineering level.
  The CN vs 1.x question would be much better if it had an open answering option, my opinion: CN has driven the community apart, abandoning an existing product that has active users on it and businesses relying on it like that was not a good decision of the project, and also not one made the apache way, it was very much driven by the team at that time pushing people onto a tech stack and buzzword bingo whereas the featureset was forgotten about (in a similar way it happened between Mifos and MifosX). It ultimately drove the efforts of collaboration apart and has resulted in various larger implementers/developer teams forking away.
  
  
• It's going on great.
• i'd like to get more involved in working with features
• The trajectory is ok but we can do better.