Support For The Worldwide Scout Movement

About Scouts

The World Organization of the Scouts Movement (WOSM) offers young people the opportunity to develop their full emotional, intellectual, physical, social, and spiritual potentials as individuals as responsible global citizens and as members of their local, national, and international communities.

Summary

With 40 million members and hundreds of international affiliate groups, the World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM) has frequent site support and maintenance needs—requirements only an adept, flexible Drupal partner can meet. That’s why WOSM’s new feature requests, routine updates, and engagement-driven enhancements to Scout.org are entrusted to Axelerant.

Our Roles

• Account Manager
• Scrum Master
• Drupal Development
• Quality Assurance

Technology Stack

• Drupal 7
• Acquia Cloud
• Behat

Challenge

After Axelerant successfully executing a pilot support project, Scouts moved to a partnership. WOSM entrusted our team with their entire digital platform portfolio, at a cost savings of 40%. With steep and frequent deadlines for enhancements, necessities like task prioritization, backlog grooming, and partner communication need to be accurate and timely.

Insights

Bringing in a Product Owner

We suggested bringing in one of our team member to act as Product Owner; someone who would work closely with Scouts to understand their business requirements and propose solutions.

Ultimately, this move helped get the right information to the scrum team faster, accelerating delivery and ensuring clarity.

The product owner also helped WOSM establish better, more effective roadmaps to ensure requirements and delivery timelines are aligned. Additionally, Axelerant provided a portfolio release plan to give a realistic picture of what could be expected and when.

2X Support

Scout.org called for a dedicated support team on-hand, poised to tackle immediate bugs, small change requests, scheduled security updates, patch maintenance, etc. But WOSM also needed a separate development team to take up their frequent enhancement and feature addition projects.

Axelerant set up two teams: one for routine support with Kanban as a framework and the other, an agile delivery team using Scrum, for site enhancements.

Solutions

Freedom For Scout’s Internal Team

After we customized a dynamic global event registration form for Jota-Joti 2015, similar requests came up like programs like logo competitions, 2016 events, etc. Axelerant customized a user-friendly project dashboard for
WOSM and gave access permission to save our partner time, money, and to enable their internal team.

Despite not having technological expertise, admins can handle form creation, generate customized reports, display collections, and more. All this happens from the inside, reducing dependency on the development team.

Enhancements & Innovation

We created an API that can be used by any local Scouts association website to login and register users. Scout users can now connect using the API without going through the process of registering through local sites anymore.

Regarding development and theming, separate site sections for World Scout Jamborees and the annual Jota-Joti event were built. Event registration was accomplished through unique and automated code generation for each user based on country and affiliate.

As WOSM and Joti-Joti site traffic began to increase, maintaining site performance became a priority. Our team quickly identified needs and introduced codebase standardization, separating custom and contributed modules.

Routine Support & Maintenance

As part of our best practices we perform routine support, maintenance, and security updates independently. Recurring tickets in our project management system prompt us to check for security updates. In our support system, we leverage the latest techniques like the use of Drush. These build scripts help update Drupal core and Drupal modules, making support fast, easy, and consistent.

Donation Platform: APIs and QA Automation

Alongside the ongoing support partnership, Scouts asked us to help develop and validate a donation platform and the APIs that power fundraising for projects run by National Scout Organizations, National Scout Associations, and local Scout groups.

Each region's child site shared a single database on the parent scouts.org platform, with its own roles and permissions. That meant creating and modifying endpoints for user roles, content types, and whitelisting or blacklisting users, without opening access to the parent system.

What we set out to do

• Study the existing APIs and produce a mapping document.
• Validate newly created and modified endpoints against expected behavior.
• Cover edge cases with efficient, repeatable API checks.
• Automate the API test suite so regressions surface early.

What ran underneath

Drupal 7 with the RESTful module on the platform side. On the QA side: API testing, compatibility testing, acceptance testing, and automation testing, folded into the existing scrum and Kanban cadence so donation-platform work moved at the same rhythm as the rest of the Scout.org portfolio.