Online system development kick-off session

The development of the land administration system started on 1 December 2020. On that day, a seven-day kick-off session started in which the IT staff of ANDF, seven hired system developers and four experts from the Dutch Land Registry (Kadaster) participated. In addition, the CDOFT ANDF and various members of the PMAF team attended part of the programme.

Due to the corona situation, most Dutch experts were unable to travel to Benin and therefore made their contribution via videoconferencing. In general, the Benin participants all sat together in a room in the ANDF office.

Thorough preparation preceded the start of the system development. Already during a mission in 2019, ANDF, PMAF and Kadaster jointly designed the architecture of the land administration system. In 2020, the LADM country profile for Benin was determined and the purchase of hardware and the hiring of external developers were put out to tender.

The system development takes place according to a modern IT approach: Agile/Scrum. This is characterised by the step-by-step development of system components without any prior specification of the system. Of course, the main objectives of the system to be developed have been determined, but during the development of the system, the developers can respond flexibly to the evolving wishes of future users.

The functionality to be developed is described in so-called user stories. All user stories are placed on the product backlog. The development team then determines the order in which the user stories will be developed into working system components. During the kick off session, the first user stories are defined, more than 20 in total. The team has now set to work on this. One of the first system components to be developed will be receiving, testing and accepting ownership data collected in the field.