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Mar 12 2020
Mar 12

Category 1: Web development

Government organizations want to modernize and build web applications that make it easier for constituents to access services and information. Vendors in this category might work on improving the functionality of search.mass.gov, creating benefits calculators using React, adding new React components to the Commonwealth’s design system, making changes to existing static sites, or building interactive data stories.

Category 2: Drupal

Mass.gov, the official website of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a Drupal 8 site that links hundreds of thousands of weekly visitors to key information, services, and other transactional applications. You’ll develop modules to enhance and stabilize the site; build out major new features; and iterate on content types so that content authors can more easily create innovative, constituent-centered services.

Category 3: Data architecture and engineering

State organizations need access to large amounts of data that’s been prepared and cleaned for decision-makers and analysts. You’ll take in data from web APIs and government organizations, move and transform it to meet agency requirements using technology such as Airflow and SQL, and store and manage it in PostgreSQL databases. Your work will be integral in helping agencies access and use data in their decision making.

Category 4: Data analytics

Increasingly, Commonwealth agencies are using data to inform their decisions and processes. You’ll analyze data with languages such as Python and R, visualize it for stakeholders in business intelligence tools like Tableau, and present your findings in reports for both technical and non-technical audiences. You’ll also contribute to the state’s use of web analytics to improve online applications and develop new performance metrics.

Category 5: Design, research, and content strategy

Government services can be complex, but we have a vision for making access to those services as easy as possible. Bidders for this category may work with partner agencies to envision improvements to digital services using journey mapping, user research, and design prototyping; reshape complex information architecture; help transform technical language into clear-public facing content, and translate constituent feedback into new and improved website and service designs.

Category 6: Operations

You’ll monitor the system health for our existing digital tools to maintain uptime and minimize time-to-recovery. Your DevOps work will also create automated tests and alerts so that technical interventions can happen before issues disrupt constituents and agencies. You’ll also provide expert site reliability engineering advice for keeping sites maintainable and building new infrastructure. Examples of applications you’ll work on include Mass.gov, search.mass.gov, our analytics dashboarding platform, and our logging tool.

Feb 06 2019
Feb 06

Mass.gov dev team releases open source project

Moshe WeitzmanMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

3 min read

Feb 6, 2019

The Mass.gov development team is proud to release a new open source project, Drupal Test Traits (DTT). DTT enables you to run PHPUnit tests against your Drupal web site, without wiping your database after each test class. That is, you test with your usual content-filled database, not an empty one. We hope lots of Drupal sites will use DTT and contribute back their improvements. Thanks to PreviousNext and Phase2 for being early adopters.

Mass.gov is a large, content-centric site. Most of our tests click around and assert that content is laid out properly, the corresponding icons are showing, etc. In order to best verify this, we need the Mass.gov database; testing on an empty site won’t suffice. The traditional tool for testing a site using an existing database is Behat. So we used Behat for over a year and found it getting more and more awkward. Behat is great for facilitating conversations between business managers and developers. Those are useful conversations, but many organizations are like ours — we don’t write product specs in Gherkin. In fact, we don’t do anything in Gherkin beside Behat.

Meanwhile, the test framework inside Drupal core improved a lot in the last couple of years (mea culpa). Before Drupal Test Traits, this framework was impossible to use without wiping the site’s database after each test. DTT lets you keep your database and still test using the features of Drupal’s BrowserTestBase and friends. See DrupalTrait::setUp() for details (the bootstrap is inspired by Drush, a different open source project that I maintain).

Zakim Bridge at Night, North End Boston. Photo by David Fox.
  • Our test cases extend ExistingSiteBase, a convenience class from DTT that imports all the test traits. We will eventually create our own base class and import the traits there.
  • Notice calls to $this->createNode(). This convenience method wraps Drupal’s method of the same name. DTT deletes each created node during tearDown().
  • Note how we call Vocabulary::load(). This is an important point — the full Drupal and Mink APIs are available during a test. The abstraction of Behat is happily removed. Writing test classes more resembles writing module code.
  • See the DTT repo for details on how to install and run tests
  • Typically, one does not run tests against a live web site. Tests can fail and leave sites in a “dirty” state so it’s helpful to occasionally refresh to a pristine database.

If you have questions or comments about DTT, please comment below or submit issues/PRs in our repository.

More from Moshe: Our modern development environment at Mass.gov

Interested in a career in civic tech? Find job openings at Digital Services.
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Oct 19 2018
Oct 19
Deirdre Habershaw2 min read

Oct 19, 2018

Today, more than 80% of people’s interactions with government take place online. Whether it’s starting a business or filing for unemployment, too many of these experiences are slow, confusing, or frustrating. That’s why the Commonwealth created Massachusetts Digital Service (Mass Digital) in the Executive Office of Technology and Security Services. Mass Digital is at the forefront of the state’s digital transformation. Its mission is to leverage the best technology and information available to make people’s interactions with state government fast, easy, and wicked awesome. There’s a lot of work to do, but we’re making quick progress.

Mass Digital worked with the new Department of Family and Medical Leave (DFML) to launch the Commonwealth’s first digitally native service: Paid Family and Medical Leave and PaidLeave.mass.gov. We’ve been on the front lines of the pandemic response, supporting the Department of Unemployment Assistance to create capabilities for multilingual unemployment claims (Unemployment.mass.gov) and doing content design to keep up with rapidly evolving pandemic unemployment benefits, and supporting the Department of Public Health and Command Center to launch the state’s vaccine preregistration system (VaccineSignUp.mass.gov).

If you want to work in a fast-paced agile environment, with a good work life balance, solving hard problems, working with cutting-edge technology, and making a difference in people’s lives, you should join Massachusetts Digital Service.

We are currently recruiting designers, researchers, and product managers. Here are links to open job postings:

If you are interested in working with us, please submit your resume here.

Check out more about hiring at the Executive Office of Technology and Security Services and submit your resume in order to be informed on roles as they become available.

About Drupal Sun

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