Angel Tree – Case Study

Angel Tree

Barry Timms is the Operations Manager for the Prison Fellowship, New Zealand. The Prison Fellowship New Zealand is a volunteer-based Christian ministry with a vision to be a national movement of reconciliation and restoration within the Criminal Justice System.

Prison Fellowship New Zealand engaged Software Projects to design and implement the “Angel Tree” web based application.

One of the tasks of The Prison Fellowship New Zealand is to try and maintain strong links between inmates and their children. One of tools for doing this is the 'Angel Tree' programme. In this programme, inmates request a gift for one or more of their children via their Prison Chaplain. Once approved, this request is dispatched to the area in which the child(ren) resides. Fellowship staff and volunteers then collect, wrap and deliver presents to those children.

Says Timms:

Software Projects has been a major help in ensuring that 3,400 children of men and women in prison received Christmas presents this past Christmas. Previously Prison Fellowship NZ managed this process with a paper-based system which meant sending a paper trail around the country. If you can imagine it, 1,400 prisoners put in a request for presents and nearly half of the caregivers of those children lived in another region than where the prison was based, it becomes a logistical nightmare.

Technical Challenges

From a technical perspective, this project had a number of significant challenges:

• There was a moderately complex underlying business process, which needed to be modelled by the Software;
• There was a complicated security model which was required to be implemented by the Software;
• The solution needed to be performant; and
• The solution needed to be simple and straightforward to use given the broad range of experience of carers using the system.

Because Angel Tree came to Software Projects with a reasonably complete 'Business Requirements Specification', Software Projects developed the software using a scaled down waterfall software development process.

This approach seemed to be the best match for the project profile. It enabled us to deliver a system quickly and effectively, especially given the fact that the customer was in a different country.

says Anthony Marendy, Software Project's technical lead for the AngelTree project.

A Successful Product

Timms was extremely happy with final solution:

Even though we were using volunteers solely, many of whom only had a little internet experience, we were easily able to process the requests and found it a much improved way to get the right presents to the right children. We were impressed with Software Projects' attention to detail and their charitable approach to a not-for-profit organisation

From technical standpoint, the solution was delivered using the Groovy/Grails platform.

The use of Groovy/Grails enabled us to deliver a high quality solution that is capable of performing now with the capacity to grow over time to support the AngelTree programme as it expands and continues to deliver a much needed service to prisoners and their families.

says Marendy.

Angel Tree continues to evolve, and Timms is eagerly looking forward to the upcoming Christmas:

Software Projects has just completed a modification for PF to make the process even better and we are eagerly looking towards Christmas - and so are the children - and at least in 2008, 30 of those lived in Australia.

Technology Highlights

• Code written in Java Enterprise Edition;
• Groovy / Grails (incorporating Hibernate and Spring);
• MySQL;
• iText (for PDF reports);
• Hudson Continuous Integration;
• Canoo Webtest;
• Cobertura Code Coverage Testing; and
• JUnit Unit Testing;