Spike - North star vision for the Grant Program and Expenditure Reporter tool (ARPA and subsequent reporting tools)

[as1729]

Context

@TylerHendrickson and I were discussing whether we should continue on with the ARPA codebase merge which started when we wanted to make a unified front-end experience. We found that it was hard to make decisions on how this codebase should evolve over time and what the ideal architecture looked like. To that end, this ticket has been created to get clarity on:

1. The ideal ARPA (and future reporting) tool user experience
2. How does the above user-experience inform our engineering decisions to either merge/split the ARPA codebase from the usdr-gost repository?

Deliverable

The goal of this work is to come up with an architecture diagram and a user-experience process flow diagram that explains what the experience looks like from the user perspective and the high-level engineering implementation of it.

This ticket is complete when the following questions are answered:

• In the ideal state - what does the reporting experience look like and how much of it resides in the excel workbook vs on a web-app.
• Is it feasible for validations to be served via an API that is called from the excel macros?
• How will the front end and backend code of the reporting tool be organized while preserving the benefits of sharing code across ARPA and ID? Is it better to split them out or continue the process of merging them.

[as1729]

cc @caitlinwinner and @mhuang-usdr ideally we would like to accomplish this by the end of this quarter within the next 6 months so we have a good sense of direction for the ARPA side of the codebase. @TylerHendrickson will be doing the initial thinking on this front.

[as1729]

@caitlinwinner I added some additional context here. @TylerHendrickson feel free to update these deliverable questions as you see fit.

[as1729]

@TylerHendrickson I believe this is being captured by the modular reporting workstream. I'm closing it from this board. Feel free to re-open if you are still actively working off of this ticket.