DIGIT is a platform launched by eGov Foundation. It was established in 2003 by Nandan Nilekani and Srikanth Nadhamuni to partner with city administrators in their efforts to leverage technology for better service delivery and enhanced productivity.
DIGIT is an open-source platform and an open API, powered for developers, enterprises, and citizens to build new applications and solutions.
DIGIT’s clients are Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) from various State Governments like Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and independent ULBs like Nagpur Municipal Corporation, Greater Chennai Corporation, NDMC(Delhi), PMIDC(Punjab).
These solutions cater to the citizens as well as the ULBs that govern these citizens. ULBs are primarily to aid Municipal Administration for the Government.
DIGIT’s platform offers –
- Integrated Service Delivery to Citizens
- Government process re-engineering
- Mobile-First Approach
- Cloud By Default
- Data Security and Preservation
Challenges
In 2018, eGov Foundation approached Moolya to test a few modules of the DIGIT platform.
Although it was an interesting problem to solve for the Moolya Team but they identified four major challenges that were related to technology, domain, product, testing process, test automation, and infrastructure —
The team had to deal with the migration challenges. The platform architecture was to be migrated from monolithic to microservices which involved technology up-gradation and integration.
The lack of required documents made it difficult for the team to gain complete confidence in the product. To make it worse, requirements were changing in every sprint and the change tracker was not maintained effectively.
The communication between multiple stakeholders was getting difficult as there was no process set. Testing had to coordinate with the eGov team and their vendors (development partners) on their own.
UI automation was challenging as the system under test was unstable.
Moolya’s Approach
Moolya began its engagement with eGov as a two-member team. The scope was to test a system involving hundreds of microservices and automate the core platform services (APIs)
- Technology:
The Moolya Team pro-actively learned about Microservices and other technologies that are used to build DIGIT platforms. Kubectl, React Native, Kafka, Kibana, PostgreSQL, Jenkins, Docker, Postman, etc., were some tools used in this project.
This aspect helped in handling technical issues and with minimum support from developers, the team was able to handle most of the configuration issues and deployment issues in QA and UAT environments.
- Domain:
DIGIT is an OpenSource, interoperable and scalable technology for citizens and urban governance bodies to manage, monitor and interact in a transparent manner.
The team had to understand the government services, various users involved at different levels, the workflows, the calculations, state government rules and regulations, etc. Moolya team worked closely with the product owners and developers as they identified a couple of challenges in the early stage of the engagement itself.
- Product:
DIGIT’s platform is quite complex and vast. DIGIT Solutions include an ERP suite, Data Analytics, Visualization and Mobile Apps. DIGIT was migrating from Monolithic to Microservices. The product is developed using multiple small services combined as one service.
Understanding the product was challenging as learning one workflow included learning all services contributing to that workflow. The situation was getting further complicated when the team had to investigate an issue to identify the root cause.
The team created visual models (mind maps, flowcharts) of the system under test to help them in understanding the requirements. This approach benefited in assessing the test coverage and also became a source for creating test charters.
Moolya team was able to pick up the complex modules with the help of powerful training and mentoring programs.
- Building Relationship:
Moolya was one among the many vendors eGov had to test a diverse set of modules – which required a high level of successful collaboration.
Moolya identified the need for building relationships with the clients and setting the right dynamic. It is pivotal to set the tone right from the beginning of the project to set the correct expectations.
Building an effective feedback loop is very important to course correct any changes needed in the project.
- API Automation:
The team automated the regression workflows using the Postman tool. To automate one workflow, 10-15 services had to be called.
As testing experts, Moolya brought in various practices to accelerate the automation process and to build a robust framework.
Outcome
Product, Tech, and Business stakeholders were very happy with the value Moolya was able to add in this partnership through a mix of their technical know-how, deep thinking skills, and commitment. Through Moolya, the DIGIT team could see —
- Significant reduction in post-production defects through structured execution and high test coverage
- Identifying cross-platform and responsive issues achieved by parallel test execution across multiple devices and platforms.
- Drastic reduction in regression rest cycle time by automating UI and API test scenarios using Postman and Selenium.
- Quick ramp-up and ramp-down of testers according to the project need.
In light of these improvements, eGov was able to focus more on building the product and not really worrying about test strategy anymore. This significant value add made the client renew the contract and move complete ownership of DIGIT’s testing requirements to Moolya – one of the many instances that we’re really proud of Moolyans living up to our vision of solving testing challenges with a passion for businesses with purpose.
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