Tirif was established in November 2014 after the author discovered a necessity for a custom Management Information System to improve efficiency among public and private schools in Ghana, West Africa. Many free and open-source software alternatives was available at the time, but did not seem to be of much interest among teachers in the primary and secondary schools in Ghana. This is believed to be, firstly, caused by the complexity involved in setting up such a system as it often requires one to know how to install and maintain web and database services, a skill that is not commonly found among teachers in Ghana. Secondly, today, majority of Management Information Systems for schools are aiming towards mobile platform solution.
Having interviewed local teachers to gather details and requirements, a first release of Tirif, that run over a secure network, was developed and written in the Python programming language. It was released in July 2016 mainly to confirm the requirements among the teachers. In September 2016, Tirif was transitioned into a stand-alone Java application with a Graphical User Interface as part of a side project whilst undertaking programming courses.
In February 2017, and the following fourteen weeks, Tirif was taken in by the author as a research project at the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. The paper was titled “Efficiently Developing a Platform Independent and User-friendly School Management Information System for Ghanaian Schools using Open Source Components”.
In September 2017, the first version of Tirif was released to the public.
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