Helping children
to escape poverty
Sukrupa is a charitable organization in Bangalore, India, that educates children living in poverty in urban slums. Founded by entrepreneur Krupalatha Martin Dass, Sukrupa’s mission is to help children and young adults escape poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance while creating opportunities for integration into mainstream society. The school provides safe surroundings, nutritious meals, and education to more than 400 children in and around R.T. Nagar, Bangalore.
Highlights Sukrupa’s new website is able to accept funds online from donors anywhere in the world. Sukrupa.org is now poised to benefit from the global support and ongoing contributions of the Open Source community. ThoughtWorks Social Impact Program hosts the development environment for the now open-sourced Sukrupa. org website, using volunteer time for support.
Technology
Ms. Dass was inspired by her mother, who personally educated impoverished children in her home. In 2002, Ms. Dass traded a successful venture as an entrepreneur to return to Bangalore in 2002 and apply her passion and energy to helping poor children get an education, and a future. She founded the charitable organization Sukrupa in 2008, and by the end of 2010, Sukrupa had provided a safe space, food and education to more than 400 children from the slums. Not far away in Bangalore, ThoughtWorks regularly conducts training for newly hired consultants from around the world in an intensive six-week session called ThoughtWorks University (TWU). All new ThoughtWorkers have a high level of technical skill, so TWU focuses on the Agile engineering and project management methodologies practiced at ThoughtWorks. Because ThoughtWorks believes in learning by doing, each TWU class implements a real-world software project using Agile methodologies.
HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS Java PHP for Wordpress site integration. Twist/Sahi for automated testing Spring MVC framework StringTemplate for view generation jsTestDriver for testing JavaScript JPA/Hibernate/Hypersonic/MySQL for persistence DBDeploy for DB schema evolution Cucumber Google Collections Sonar for metrics Ammado Mingle Go
Sukrupa meets ThoughtWorks University A ThoughtWorker who happened to know of Sukrupa and had a longstanding friendship with the founder, knew that the organization could benefit from a pro bono TWU project. Online donations had recently been frozen in a dispute with PayPal, thus blocking an important financial channel and finding an alternative would require skills, and time, that were not easily available within Sukrupa. Sukrupa was also outgrowing its original student records processes, which consisted of a large collection of excel spreadsheets to track student progress, accomplishments, and keep notes for parent meetings. Preparation for required parent meetings, or for school or other related events involving the students, usually required manual searches of multiple excel documents, using scarce administration and volunteer time. The school was incurring similar effort planning volunteers’ schedules, staying connected with sponsors, and receiving donations (online, and through online initiated campaigns). In keeping with the company’s core values, including promotion of social justice and volunteerism, TWU worked with Sukrupa from January through May of 2011, resulting in three successive classes working on the project to identify needs and produce real working software for the organization.
Now, it gets real The initial TWU project team, 22 new ThoughtWorkers and 7 trainers, landed at Sukrupa in mid-January, after a week of classroom orientation on ThoughtWorks methodology and practices. The team from Sukrupa included the founder, Ms. Krupa Dass, the school’s Director, Mr. Sathya Jayaraman, and two key staff members—volunteers who worked with all the school records, and were responsible for various tasks involving students, organizing other volunteers, preparing documents and notes for interviews with parents—whatever was needed.
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With a delivery deadline five weeks away, the joint team met for an initial two-day Inception process to identify and prioritize needs, and decide the targets for the five-week plan. Krupa herself began the process the evening before, with an impassioned overview of the school, its operations, and its mission. For many of the new ThoughtWorkers, coming to India itself was a bit of culture shock. But it was truly moving to hear Krupa’s overview and stories of the situation faced by the children in the slums, and in impoverished rural areas. A top priority was to reinstate some method for online donations, to get back that key financial channel to the charity. This meant finding a means other than PayPal that would work globally. Another release priority would be to overhaul the existing website to make it easier for the Sukrupa staff to keep content updated, giving them a means to increase communications with sponsors without having to dedicate as much staff time. After the Inception meetings, the ThoughtWorkers went back to begin development. Weekly visits were made onsite with the Sukrupa team to review requirements, and the Sukrupa folks came onsite to TWU for weekly showcases and to give feedback on the working software that was produced at the end of each week.
Getting things done, in six-week sprints
Trainees up against real-world issues
The first team concluded in late February, with a new Sukrupa. org website released, with hosting using Amazon AWS sponsored personally by one of the trainers from the initial TWU project team. ThoughtWorks’ Social Impact Program is hosting the development environment, including instances of Mingle® and Go™. The new site is based primarily on Java with the Open Source Spring MVC framework; it is integrated with Wordpress for straightforward content management, and with the “ammado” global donations platform (to replace PayPal). The first project team also created an Events Summary capability and an offline donations guide for staff.
This was not “just a training project” and the ThoughtWorkers felt the need to get things accomplished as planned, to make a difference for Sukrupa. They quickly encountered a typical real-world issue: the Sukrupa representatives were absorbed with ongoing work, quite important work, aside from the TWU project. The team had to make some decisions to keep things moving on schedule, always relying on the joint project vision from the Inception, and their knowledge of Sukrupa’s mission and the issues. Everything was regularly checked and recalibrated at the weekly requirement’s meetings and showcases.
The second TWU project team arrived at Sukrupa shortly after the first project concluded. Since the entire team save for some of the trainers was turning over, the first team had created handover notes as well as videos to get the second team ramped up as soon as possible.
Although showcases and meetings sometimes had to be delayed and/or rescheduled, the TWU projects ran on track and were all able to release valuable work in just five weeks.
The second and third teams both were able to leverage from the foundation created by the first team, and the Sukrupa representatives were familiar with the process by then. The second team agreed at Inception to focus on areas that would make Sukrupa staff and volunteers more productive and to provide a means for them to embed knowledge they were gaining about running the organization into systems and documents in order to spread both their knowledge and work load to newer staff.
“
Our first thought was that we are very busy with almost no extra help, do we have enough time and emotional strength to interact with high energy young people! Working with ThoughtWorks University Grads was magical for SUKRUPA. Extraordinarily skilled, very driven, highly professional, sensitive to our working style. They put their heart and mind to deliver the best. We could see our passion, emotion, vision, mission, thoughts transforming into a high tech interactive website that integrated the activities into an organized system for internal admin and connected SUKRUPA to a wider audience to create more opportunities for the children and young adults that we serve.
”
Krupalatha Martin Dass Founder & Executive Director - Sukrupa
www.thoughtworks.com
By the end of April, with a second release, new volunteers for Sukrupa were able to be recruited and sign up through the new website, and the school records were moved from excel spreadsheets to a new administrative system. This freed up valuable time for the full-time staff and volunteers who manage the school and all the corresponding student and family records.
Getting ready for wider collaboration By mid-June, a third TWU team had engaged with Sukrupa, this time focusing on improvements to position Sukrupa for open sourcing, to encourage ongoing collaborations from a larger community of contributors. The team rewrote Acceptance tests in Cucumber, and introduced unit testing and an automated build to the public side of the site (written in PHP). They also implemented features to increase donations and sponsor participation, such as newsletter signup, and the ability to easily send a monthly newsletter from the admin area. Student profiles can now easily be created from the new records system, and emailed to sponsors.
Australia
Sydney t: +61 2 9224 1700 email:
[email protected]
Brazil
Porto Alegre t: +55 51 30 793550 email:
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Canada
Calgary t: +1 403 263 3287 email:
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The future As a result of this collaboration between TWU, the ThoughtWorks Social Impact Program, and the team at Sukrupa, the organization has its donations lifeline back, and staff have new tools to make them even more productive than before. Over sixty-five ThoughtWorkers learned lessons about life, in addition to their lessons about delivering real-world projects. The Sukrupa school has been helping children and young adults for over 9 years, making do with what they have. It is an organization run on huge hearts, and we believe that the joint effort will help both staff and volunteers to become even more effective educators and community leaders. To help out, please email
[email protected] for information on volunteer opportunities.
China
Beijing t: +86 10 6407 6695 email:
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Germany
Hamburg t: +49 40 300 95 880 email:
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India
Bangalore t: +91 80 2508 9572 email:
[email protected]
UK
London t: +44 20 7497 4500 email:
[email protected]
US
Chicago t: +1 312 373 1000 email:
[email protected]
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