About
The Home Office Engineering Guidance and Standards site is a body of knowledge for software engineers. It is comprised of principles, patterns and standards that define how we do engineering at the Home Office, and that direct how we want to do engineering in the future. This guidance is created and curated by the Home Office engineering community. The project as a whole is led by the Home Office DDaT Engineering Profession team.
How you can contribute
The Home Office has a large estate of teams and technology products. There is a wealth of experience and best practice that we can draw on, to standardise some of the things that we do and manage quality consistently. This will help us to deliver secure, performant technology that meets user needs, and deliver it quickly.
We want to use our large community to shape the guidance and standards on this site so guilds have been created to have a network to write content based on topics related to their areas. These guilds are open to anyone in the Home Office with an interest in the given subject (Software Design, Ways of Working etc.).
The guilds meet regularly to discuss topics relating to their areas and contribute towards the guidance, standards and principles.
Guild information
On Home Office Slack you’ll find more information for each guild in their respective channels along with when they meet, and who to contact to join.
- Build, release and deployment guild
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Topics related to the release and deployment pipeline including CI/CD, Feature Toggling and Artefact Management.
- Low Code
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A space to discuss low-code engineering guidance and standards.
- Observability
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Topics relating to the ongoing monitoring of applications and services, including Logging, Analytics and Performance.
- Security
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Articles in this section relate to subjects such as Secure Development, Identity & Access and Vulnerability Scanning.
- Software Design
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Items to be covered to include Frameworks, Languages, Quality and Coding Standards.
- Source Management
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Items to be covered to include Open Source, Licensing and Source Code Management.
- Ways of Working
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Items to be covered to include Documentation, Tooling and Defining Stories.
Why we are doing it
In 2021 we conducted a discovery across a wide range of our engineering teams, including suppliers and civil servants, and encompassing all of our delivery portfolios. We found that there were a number of key areas that we should prioritise for centralised guidance. Since then we have been running guilds and other working groups to identify the more specific needs of our engineers, and develop guidance to meet those needs.
This guidance was originally published on an internal content platform. We have since decided to open source it here for a number of reasons, the three main reasons being:
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We work in government and should be as transparent as we can be about how we work. We are committed to following the service standard and the Home Office DDaT strategy by working in the open.
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It makes it easier for people to find and use. Navigating around the different internal locations of documentation in the Home Office isn’t always straightforward. We want our people and partners to be able to quickly discover the information they need to work.
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It means that our peers and colleagues, across government and technology communities, can see how we work, and contribute to improvement. We are keen to adopt ways of working from open source communities, and become a better contributor to them too.
How we manage the site
Proposed content for principles, standards and patterns go through a short process of collaborative creation, and require approval from Home Office engineering leadership to be merged into the site. This is managed via a process which will be familiar to users of GitHub - creating issues and branches for new content, and raising pull requests for review. We also have a small group of engineers committed to the ongoing maintenance and improvement of this site.
You can find out more about how to contribute in our CONTRIBUTING.md and you can raise an issue directly onto the GitHub repository.
Our roadmap
We have work on site and content improvements happening in parallel. The long term enhancements we are looking at are below:
- Grow the body of guidance and standards, by continuing to engage our engineering community and supporting them to create new content
- Build a self-assurance mechanism so that teams can easily assert compliance with the standards
- Continue development of the site so that it is an examplar of conformance to our growing collection of standards