Provide a good engineering experience
Last updated: 26 July 2023
At the Home Office, we recognise that the engineer experience is comprised of many different aspects, and that getting those things right allows engineers to produce their best work. We will invest in the continuous improvement of our engineering experience.
Rationale
The Home Office engineering experience is more than tooling and platforms and technology meeting engineers’ needs. It is affected by our working relationships, our community, our structures and our culture. Engineers complete work quicker and at higher quality when the tools, environments and teams they work with provide the right capabilities and support. When they don’t have those things, work moves more slowly, technical debt is accrued and security can be compromised. We want to reduce day-to-day friction and duplication, to improve productivity.
It is important to remember that engineers are users too, we already have proven patterns for the best ways to meet user needs and they should be followed. To improve engineer experience we will meet engineering needs in the same way as we would with any other user need, centering engineers’ feedback and experience when testing solutions that have been designed for them. This will provide the Home Office with a measurable and evidenced approach to factors that contribute to productivity and efficiency.
Applications and Implications
- The Home Office’s cloud platform engineering should deliver platforms as products that are developed according to tenant projects’ needs. Engineers should engage with platforms to provide the feedback needed to continuously improve the developer experience
- Engineers use tools and services, use user research methods to understand and guide how that experience can be improved
- Look at the whole experience for engineers to understand how teams and organisation impact the work that they do, alongside the tools and services they consume
- Build an essential, community-driven body of knowledge for engineers to follow and refer to, making their jobs easier by promoting common patterns and golden paths to achieve their objectives
- Onboard and integrate engineers into an inclusive community, encouraged to develop, and empowered to improve the overall state of engineering at the Home Office
- Strong working relationships with supporting teams, delivery partners, and other professions in a multi-disciplinary environment