Co-budget and organization around the tax overhaul dev

Hi @MyriamBoure et. al.

@oeoeaio and @Kirsten and I have sat down and chatted about the tax overhaul work today. Here’s a download of what we discussed:

First up, we absolutely agree about building local dev capacity and very excited about @pierredelacroix joining the team! Great to have you on board and we look forward to working together :slight_smile: Also, incredible job @MyriamBoure getting your head around all this and taking massive leap towards designing a solution that could work for everyone. We can see where you’re going with this, and it could be seriously great. There’s a trade off though, between flexibility in the system vs complexity to build and turnaround time to launch. We note this because this kind of flexibility requires a lot of work to get through before the end of the year.

To get into the detail . . .

  1. When it comes to understanding how the newly designed/overhauled tax function needs to work for the Australian instance, this is something that Rob @oeoeaio and Sally @sstead will do as representatives of Australian users.

  2. Something to keep in mind is the Spree Upgrade work that @RohanM is currently doing (more detail on this here and here and here and here) will change a lot of the tax set up, and may solve some of the problems that OFN France currently have. Changes made now to tax may increase the complexity of the Spree Upgrade work. We would suggest the first task for @MyriamBoure and @pierredelacroix is to closely review the latest version of Spree and understand to what extent this version resolves the some of the problems. If it gets a long way there, then another option might be for Pierre to help with the spree upgrade

  3. Rob @oeoeaio has allocated an extra 1-2 days of his time to work on the estimate (as we discussed on email @MyriamBoure). This is on top of his OFN allocated time, and is being carved out of his life to try and help you get this moving. So it absolutely has to be paid. It will cost $100/hour, so $1200 AUD for 2 days of work. OFN AU was going to cover this initially as a loan and include in the estimate, to recoup the cost once the funding came through (i.e. we carry risk). We figured this was the best approach as you guys still needed to source funding and didn’t have the cash for the time needed to complete initial solution scoping and estimate. Rob has indicated that he can take on a total of 3 extra days worth of work up till the end of the year to assist with this work, uncertain as to whether this is enough to cover what you’ll need in terms of assistance for @pierredelacroix, code reviews, testing, and release. It needs to be paid for, preferably as incurred if there is money available.

  4. Given the complexity of the work required to do a tax overhaul, we wanted to make sure everyone understands that this isn’t going to be a quick thing to do - we think getting it done by Christmas is very ambitious. What’s in the spec you’ve written @MyriamBoure is not straightforward, many of the changes require a fundamental change to the way tax works in the OFN platform and will have flow through effects throughout the site. Some of the individual changes may not be that complex, but making sure that nothing has broken further along the chain is going to take a fair bit of time and effort. It’s likely to break a fair few things and they’ll each have to be discovered and then fixed (solution designed and fix implemented).

IS THERE A MORE AGILE WAY TO GO ABOUT THIS? Given the users you’re trying to keep, is it possible that a smaller sub-set of a solution would get across the line, and perhaps be more feasible sooner?

That’s it from the 3 of us. A long response and a lot to digest :smile:

Thoughts on the next steps?