This year, OCA Days took place from 30 September to 1ᵉʳ October 2024, and Smile had the honour of taking part in this now unmissable event for the Odoo community. Our experts, Laurent Weber and Cédric Leroy, look back at the highlights of these two intense days. 

What are OCA Days?

Before getting to the heart of the matter, it's essential to understand why this association exists and what role it plays in the Odoo ecosystem.

Odoo is a very popular ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software package, available in two versions: an enterprise version (Enterprise) and a community version (Community).

The Odoo Community Association was set up in 2013 to support, structure and promote collaborative development of the Community version of Odoo. It brings together developers, integrators, companies and passionate contributors around the same vision: to guarantee a powerful and open ERP, while remaining true to the values of free software.

OCA Days are more than just a conference. They provide an ideal opportunity to strengthen links between members of the community, partners and contributors, while exploring new technical and functional challenges.

Development: innovation at the heart of the community

The developers present were able to embark on code sprints. The various contributors got together to solve various technical problems, develop improvements or focus on the migration, which turned into a marathon of Reviews and Pull Requests. Through these sprints, an entire open-source methodology was described and put to the test in real life. This collective work illustrates the strength of the collaborative spirit that reigns within the OCA.

From technical talks to feedback

Here are some of the key topics that came out of the various presentations: 

• Migration: Recent versions of Odoo offer new functionalities, enhanced security and updated legal processes, particularly in the field of accounting. Migrating from an older version to a recent version of Odoo is a challenge for technical teams, integrators and end users alike. The OCA community is offering us a methodology that uses their tools to ensure a secure migration process.
• Optimising performance: The various workshops asked us to consider the limitations of the tool in very specific areas and highlighted a number of open source tools that can optimise performance on both the server and application sides.
• Good development practices: A recurring theme at OCA Days 2024 was the importance of adopting good development practices that ensure robustness, reliability and maintainability of the code, and therefore greater user satisfaction. To this end, the association provides technical documentation that defines Odoo development standards. At Smile, our experts are already applying these practices, which are part of our daily routine. Our teams promote them, implement them and ensure that they are respected and regularly updated. 

These discussions highlighted a virtuous circle: improved code quality leads to more robust code and applications, which in turn contributes to everyone's satisfaction during product development. 

The OCA, a pillar for the Open Source community

By bringing together developers, integrators, companies and passionate contributors, the OCA embodies the open source spirit. It ensures that the community version of Odoo continues to evolve and enhance its functionality, while giving users access to flexible, free solutions. This collaborative dynamic is one of the driving forces behind innovation in the Odoo ecosystem, and the OCA Days are a showcase for it. The strength of the OCA Days lies in their ability to get us thinking and questioning the place of open source in the software world.

The OCA Days 2024 have once again demonstrated the importance of collaborative work and community involvement in moving the Odoo ecosystem forward. Smile is proud to contribute to this dynamic as a committed player in the community.