Agile feature development for a licence advisory service for scientific software within the Helmholtz Association – including new features, OAuth integration, and an automation API.
Client/Company/Industry
GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences
Duration
16 months
Product
Software
Expertise
Software Development
GFZ is developing a licence advisory service that helps researchers within the Helmholtz Association choose appropriate open-source licences for their software. The goal of the project was to iteratively extend the existing service with new features and thereby increase its adoption across the scientific community.
Requirements were refined by the client as user stories with concrete acceptance criteria, with effort estimates agreed jointly in story points.
The service was already in production, meaning new features had to be integrated cleanly into an existing codebase without disrupting live usage. The combination of questionnaire logic, OAuth integration for two separate platforms, and an automation API required careful coordination of system boundaries.
The agile project structure added a further layer of complexity - requirements were refined iteratively, which called for both flexibility in implementation and a solid understanding of the domain context.
Programming Languages
TypeScript, Python
Technologies
Next.js, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, Docker, GitLab CI
Licence advisory service interface showing the guided questionnaire and licence recommendation view.
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All requested features were successfully delivered. The licence advisory service reached a broader audience within the scientific community and now covers a wider range of advisory scenarios - from guided licence selection to automated processing via an open API.
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