Digital Bill Processing System: A Role-Based Workflow, Version-Control and Audit System for Tracking Bills from Drafting to Publication at the National Assembly of Zambia

Bills at the National Assembly of Zambia (NAZ) pass through three institutions and eight stages, from drafting at the Ministry of Justice, through First, Second, Committee, Report and Third Reading in the House, to presidential assent and publication by the Government Printer. Hand-offs between these offices are largely manual, so it is difficult to establish where a Bill is, which text is current, who changed it and whether statutory time limits apply. This project designed, implemented and evaluated a web-based Digital Bill Processing System that gives every Bill a single, shared and auditable record. Following a design science approach and an Agile Scrum process, the team built a three-tier system: a Next.js 14 client hosted on Vercel, a stateless Spring Boot 4 REST API running in Docker on Amazon EC2, and a PostgreSQL database on Amazon RDS whose schema is versioned through ten Flyway migrations. The Bill lifecycle is enforced as an eight-state finite state machine with role-based access control, so only the office that owns a stage can advance a Bill, save a version or decide an amendment. The system also provides append-only version control with a line-based comparison view, amendment management, full-text search, in-app notifications, statutory-period tracking with legal citations, reports exported to PDF and Excel, and an audit trail protected by a database trigger. Verification used 125 JUnit test methods in 15 test classes (158 executed test cases, all passing), run by a GitHub Actions pipeline with a Docker smoke test. Validation used a user acceptance test on the live deployment in which 25 participants carried out three tasks covering search, version comparison and stage advancement, and completed the System Usability Scale (SUS) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) items. Participants completed 90.7% of task attempts, gave a mean SUS score of 70.8, rated as good and above the benchmark of 68, and rated perceived usefulness, ease of use and intention to use between 4.22 and 4.35 out of 5. The results show that a role-based workflow system can make Bill processing at NAZ traceable and transparent; the main difficulty reported was unfamiliarity with legislative language rather than the interface, and the system is ready for a supervised pilot with National Assembly staff.