Grameen Foundation

Background Grameen Foundation (GF) is partnering with/supporting Kenya Entrepreneurship Empowerment Foundation (KEEF), a Kenyan microfinance institution which is benefitting from Grameen Foundation’s products designed to advance microfinance. KEEF uses the Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI), a simple tool that helps inexpensively measure how quickly clients move out of poverty and is operating on Mifos, GF’s MIS platform. KEEF is the first MFI globally to pilot GF’s mobile money concept to make the transfer of loan money and repayments much easier and more secure for clients. Grameen Foundation believes that by adopting mobile money technology, microfinance institutions will be able to lower their operational costs while simultaneously increasing the range of services available to their clients. KEEF is in the process of incorporating mobile money service into its operations, it will thus reduce costs associated with managing cash and providing financial service to poor people in the remote areas. Grameen Foundation’s mobile money strategy aims to ensure that we are positioned to take a leading role in the mobile money space by testing and developing our capacity to enable MFIs to gain efficiencies from the adoption of mobile money. Grameen Foundation supported Keef in implementing K-Pesa, its mobile payments solution, through training, software development and capacity building activities. As the project moves into its automation phase, we are looking for assistance to help KEEF’s IT staff on user acceptance testing as this is outside of the usual job description. As mentioned above KEEF is operating on MIFOS, Grameen Foundation’s award winning open source management information system. Thus we look for a volunteer to help in the finalization of this product and to pass on high level knowledge and skills to the KEEF IT staff. Project Description and Volunteer Deliverables We are looking for a volunteer/a group of volunteers (developers) to help KEEF in this endeavor. The volunteer/a group of volunteers is expected to: - To understand the products’ functionality and technical specifications; - meet with KEEF IT project managers and other stakeholders to collect and validate user requirement; - Help staff learn to capture metrics for management and status reporting; - Assist staff in identifying detailed descriptions of defects and how to track on the database and assess their impact and urgency; - Research and answer escalated issues; - Read and interpret technical materials; - Create and execute automated program scripts for testing when required; - Verify that program functions according to business requirements; - Recommend program improvements or corrections to programmers; - Teach staff to write test plans and test case documentation; - Train users on proper techniques, new functionality and procedures and during User Acceptance Testing works with user to ensure satisfaction with respect to program and product quality and reliability; - Work with the development team on the product, especially with regard to problem diagnosis and resolution; and - Compiles and evaluates testing summary and determines future steps of product flow. and contributes to the establishment of standards and procedures for software testing Expected Results The product will be fully functionally and in operation with staff capable to do basic UAT for future upgrades. Project Timeline The project will start as soon as the qualified volunteer/group of volunteers is identified and continue till the end of March, 2011. Volunteer Requirements We seek a volunteer/group of volunteers with the following qualities: strong analytical skills; problem solving, works well in group problem solving situations; project management; technical skills, shares expertise with others; communication, effectively and efficiently; efficiently prioritizes and plans work activities; quality, looks for ways to improve and promote quality. Fundamental knowledge of, or 3-5 years direct experience with, software testing tools. Experience with MS SQL preferred.