Vehicle tax & SORN – the team spent last week tidying things up and running tests with DVLA staff. They then launched the public beta on Thursday last week. Early counts suggest that nearly 5,000 people have taxed/SORNd their cars over the first few days using the beta. The team are now looking at the feedback and data to see what improvements we can make.
View driving record – a good couple of weeks for this project. They’ve test loaded a couple of million dummy driving records into the production system to see what bottlenecks exist & how long the initial load of data will take. They’ve also successfully loaded the real data from a select group of people into a special test environment so we can run a limited private beta for the next couple of weeks. This private beta will hopefully expose any data quality issues we have before we open it up to the public.
Vehicle management & personalised registrations – great progress on the alpha. The team have produced a prototype of our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and are out testing it with potential users of the service to get feedback and help us build a backlog for the beta. We’ve also spent quite a bit of time looking at the legacy DVLA services we’ll have to interact with to see how we can put data into and get data out of them.
Other things – I’ve spent some time sifting applications for jobs at the new HMRC digital centre in Newcastle. I’ll be heading up there this week (along with several others from GDS) to interview those who got through the sift. I also spent quite a bit of time with DVLA’s new transformation director talking about the software development culture we’re hoping to build.