We have previously written about how we have smoke tests running continuously which check that GOV.UK is responding properly. Late last year, we noticed that we were consistently seeing a problem with the part of GOV.UK served by the Performance …
On April 17th, deep in the pre-election period, we released a new search feature that allows GOV.UK users to search inside long-form web documents called Manuals.
This Parliament ends on 30 March. Between then and the general election on 7 May is the pre-election period and the Civil Service communicates less, in line with the General Election Guidance.
Web server configuration can be tricky to get right. Applications like nginx or apache are flexible and powerful. However this flexibility can result in configuration which is hard to understand, hard to maintain, and easy to accidentally break. On the …
The QCon conference arrived in London this week - it's a big deal for anyone involved in software development. Our technology team at the Government Digital Service (GDS) spoke at the event, along with speakers from a number of talented …
Acceptance criteria (ACs) are a key part of user stories. They set the boundaries of what should be achieved - telling the developer when to stop, the QA how to test, and the product owner what to expect. Because they’re …
GOV.UK has on average 12 million visits per week. The vast majority of users simply find what they want or need and then leave. However, some users need to print parts of the site. A very few of those users …
In a previous blog post we talked about how we use the programming language Go. But it only briefly touched on the issue of dependency management, where Go is reliant on backwards compatible or vendored software. This post is about …
The GOV.UK team recently had a firebreak to repay some technical debt, experiment with things we might not otherwise have the chance to, and prepare for how we're going to iterate the site in 2015. I looked at implementing Content Security Policy …
For much of January, GOV.UK had a firebreak. It’s where teams are given some time to investigate new ideas and clean up technical debt. As part of this we ran a game day. In this blog post I'm going to …