Background

This year marks the 15th year of our long-standing partnership with Lions Befrienders Service Association (LBSA). Having touched the lives of over 86,000 elders in our community, LBSA is one of Singapore’s leading eldercare SSAs. They aim to help seniors age gracefully and healthly within our communities, and lead meaningful and fulfilling lives with the 5 core services they provide:

  1. Befriending Services
  2. SAC Cluster Support
  3. Home Personal Care
  4. Senior Group Home
  5. Active Ageing Centres (AACs)

With thousands of befriendees and volunteers under their wing, managing vast amounts of confidential data and administrative work is difficult, complicated and tedious. With sights set on greatly expanding their reach to meet the demands of our ageing society, the need for automation is clear.

This is where CVWO comes in. Over 15 iterations of CVWO, we’ve been working hard to build robust and comprehensive tech solutions to the unique challenges faced by LBSA. Besides the main LBSA web application that helps support the agency’s day-to-day operations, we’ve also built a separate Volunteer App, a Client Booking App, and a dedicated Case Management System (CMS).


Project Objectives

Tech Stack Alignment

2023 is an exciting year for CVWO. It’s the year of change. Working in tandem with the organisation wide vision to unify and modularise (the Cornerstone vision), the Lions team took on the challenge of migrating the frontend of our main web app from Rails View to React (Typescript). This is part of a two-part process of aligning the tech stacks across all CVWO projects. With hundreds of pages to port, a small team, and just 13 weeks, this was by no means an easy task.


Project Process

Codebase Familiarization

LBSA has one of the largest codebases in CVWO. Our main web app spans over 300k lines of code alone, which can be daunting for most of our first-year developers who have only had experiences with smaller scaled projects. As such, the team started off by working on bug fixes and enhancements to get a better idea of the architecture and design decisions made by previous teams.

Besides clearing some of the backlog of bugs, our team also introduced a new report into the system, and ability to mass import befriendee alerts from excel files. This also helped our developers gain a better understanding of LBSA’s complex requirements, and how they have changed dynamically over the past few years.

AAS Alerts Excel Import Volunteer Long Service Award Report

Porting to React

The main bulk of the Summer was spent on porting our frontend to React. Each member took complete ownership of porting several modules. Besides setting up the writing new pages, we also had to expose new API endpoints at our backend for every page ported. In addition, we made UI enhancements and minor bug fixes to the pages along the way. In total, our team managed to port 42 functional modules, comprising over 150 pages in under 13 weeks, writing an impressive total of 80-90k lines of code.

Befriendee Page (Old: Rails) Befriendee Page (New: React)
HPC Review Monthly Statements (Old: Rails) HPC Review Monthly Statements (New: React)

Singpass and other Enhancements

Besides porting to React, our developers also had the opportunity to work on several other enhancements to the system. For example, we had the opportunity to upgrade 2FA functionalities implemented last year. This included upgrading the Singpass workflow from QR to redirect, as per new guidelines. We also implemented 2FA on login capability (on top of action-based 2FA). Our team also enhanced the Checkcall Monitoring Report by integrating a new calendaring view to better support their needs, on top a few other minor enhancements.

Befriendee Checkcall Monitoring (Old View) Befriendee Checkcall Monitoring (New Calendar View) Singpass 2FA


Project Team

Lions 2023 Team
  • Chloe Lim Xinying (Project Lead, Year 2)
  • Gao Tianrun (Developer, Year 1)
  • Jonas Ong Si Wei (Developer, Year 1)
  • Megan Loo Jia Vern (Developer, Year 1)
  • Ng Yin Joe (Developer, Year 1)
  • Toh Li Heng (Developer, Year 1)


Team Photos

LBSA AAC Site Visit CVWO GIC Visit
Working face-to-face at NUS Work-from-home discord calls


Afterthoughts

So thankful to have had this opportunity to work with such amazing teammates who are such dedicated, passionate, and talented individuals. None of this would have been possible without every single one of them. Its been such an enriching summer, and I’m grateful to be given this chance to hopefully make a positive impact on the community!

– Chloe

CVWO has been an interesting experience where we learnt more about software engineering while working on real projects that solve real world problems. I’m thankful for such a learning experience.

– Tianrun

CVWO has been one of the most challenging yet fulfilling experiences of my life. I’ve learnt a great deal of both technical expertise and soft skills from the summer and getting to work with an amazing team on a project that gives back to VWOs and the community has been incredibly enriching!

– Jonas

CVWO is not just about writing code; it’s about crafting business solutions that help VWOs to make a positive impact on society. This journey of growth, learning, and camaraderie was truly an overall fulfilling and meaningful experience.

– Megan

CVWO has been a fruitful experience, exposing me to a large and complex codebase, and many challenging technical problems. It is an honour to work with so many talented individuals.

– Joe

CVWO is a truly unique experience for freshmen to spend a meaningful summer by helping the community with technology, and hone their skills in the process. It is truly humbling and memorable to work with some of the brightest students.

– Li Heng

We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the following people who have been influential and supportive during our project:

  • Prof Ben Leong (NUS) for his patient guidance.
  • LBSA staff for their cooperation and support throughout the project.
  • GIC for their generous support for the programme.