Department of Motor Vehicles -Israeli Ministry of Transport
Expansion of Vehicle Registration Numbers
Background
To keep pace with the rapid growth of vehicles appearing on the roads every year, the Israel Ministry of Transport (MOT) decided to expand vehicle registration numbers from 7 to 8 digits. After going through the requisite bid solicitation process MOT awarded the project to MOST Software Technologies.
A Key requirement was the Vendor’s ability to automate the process of identifying the areas that would be impacted by the change and the ability to automate the application remediation. MOT included the field expansion of an additional 4 fields as part of the same project.
Additionally, project scope included interfaces to 78 external agencies such as banks, insurance companies, car dealerships, toll roads, police & other government agencies, which needed to upgrade and test the changes made to their systems.
Objectives
In conducting this project MOT had the following objectives:
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To ready all the relevant systems to support the designated field expansions including - Application code, Database tables, Sequential files, JCL, Interfaces to external systems
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Provide for a six month transitional period, after go live, whereby MOT would support interfacing to external agencies that may or may not have transitioned to the new expanded field formats
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Setup a QA environment to automate the application regression testing process relevant to the project at hand and support MOT’s ongoing application development activities upon project completion
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Document and create a knowledgebase of testing scenarios that would support post project testing
All the interfaces between the Ministry and other governmental agencies and commercial institutions such as banks, insurance companies, toll roads, vehicle importers, police, customs, and other government ministries need to be upgraded to handle this change.
Project Scope
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10,000 programs – 3.0M lines of code
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350 database tables
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Interfaces to 78 external agencies
Project Methodology
Field expansion and application change:
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MOST used its in-house developed OnDiscovery and OnTarget tools to support the process of impact analysis.
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Based on the output of the impact analysis these tools were used to generate the code changes required to support the field expansion.
QA Testing environment:
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Given that the testers engaged on the project were familiar with QA practices and tools available in the open systems environment, HP-ALM was adopted as the tool to support and manage the testing process.
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MF-Test – MOST’s mainframe application regression testing solution was designated as the tool to automate all mainframe application regression testing.
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An API to support interfacing HP-ALM to MF-Test was developed. The API allows for a tester, working from an HP-ALM workstation to submit tests to be run under MF-Test on the mainframe. Test results are automatically generated and exported to the HP-ALM environment. As such a tester with no mainframe knowledge can conduct the QA processes necessary for application regression testing.
Create knowledgebase for ongoing regression testing:
Based on testing scenarios, both online and batch, defined within HP-ALM, a knowledge base of testing scenarios was implemented under MF-Test. As such, MOT has relieved the organization’s dependence on selected SME’s with respect to application testing.
This knowledgebase is available to the entire organization and will serve as a resource to facilitate future testing.
MOST’s approach for the project was to target go live ASAP with the Ministry’s core applications while enabling the external agencies to catch up one by one, as and when they each completed the adaptations of their interfaced systems to the new environment.