Category: Week Notes Archive

View driving record – lots of my focus over the past few weeks has been assisting this team to get to their public beta.

It’s been a bit of a testing-fest with load, penetration and data quality testing going on. As the data from the driving records goes though a pretty complicated process to get to us, the DVLA testing team have been working hard to make sure we’re receiving and interpreting the data in the correct way. This work has been going on over the past few weekends, as well as testing the links to DWP/HMRC for our interim identity-assurance process.

I started off the fortnight with 4 days in sunny Newcastle doing interviews for HMRC’s new digital centre. It’s always interesting sitting on the other side of an interview table, but these were somewhat unusual as we held them in hotel rooms. Luckily the hotel had replaced the beds with tables otherwise it could have been a bit awkward.

We finished off the Newcastle trip with a meet-up in the Brewdog bar where a fair few developers (and others) came to hear about what GDS and HMRC are up-to and how government is changing.

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.

Quite clearly I didn’t manage to keep up with my intention to publish my week notes regularly. As things became a little crazy before Christmas, these always ended up at the bottom of my prioritised list.

I’m going to give them another go, but they’ll probably be shorter, but hopefully still interesting.

So, recently…

Vehicle tax & SORN – in my last set of notes I mentioned that we’d set up a team to look at making the tax disc buying process easier. This team has been working away since then to build a service we can release into public beta. A few weeks ago we passed our Digital by Default Service Standard Assessment (read the report), so hopefully we’ll be ready to show it off to the public soon.

The last few weeks have involved lots of spinning plates.

Two weeks ago GOV.UK reached one year old. We celebrated in the traditional way with blogs, cake and beer.

Building out the new DVLA cloud infrastructure is ongoing. The View driving record team has started and completed the first stories focussed on Identity Assurance. There has also been conversations about network connectivity and the wider DVLA technical transformation plan.

The last couple of weeks have been dominated by one topic – infrastructure. As mentioned in my previous week notes, we’ve been designing and building out the production infrastructure for the View Driving Record service at DVLA. Lots of effort has gone into talking to suppliers, designing what we need and spinning it all up.

We’ve been working closely with colleagues from GDS and HMRC who have used similar patterns and who are also in the process of spinning up their infrastructure services. This is giving us the chance to learn from each other and avoid repeating mistakes or falling down rabbit holes. All seems to be going well, but we’ve got at least another couple of weeks of this ahead.

I’ve neglected my week notes for a little while so here is a condensed update covering week 16 to 21.

Part of the reason for the lack of notes is that I took a couple of weeks off towards the end of August. I tried to avoid using my computer during these weeks and completely cut myself off from anything work related. This inevitably led to an insane amount of work prior to my time off and a crazy period of catching up upon my reassimilation.

It’s been another busy few weeks.

Our big focus over these few weeks has been making sure absolutely everything we have to do before our public beta is included in our backlog.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time with the dev team and lots of people at DVLA teasing out missing stories, converting ‘documents’ into stories and working out dependencies. It’s always amazing how many stories are hidden in documents and not fully visible.

Some belated notes from last week.

The week started off with a very quiet few days in Swansea. Lots of people were away for various reasons so, for me, it was pretty unproductive. I did however get to spend some more time with the IT contract management team and see the latest show & tell from the view my driving record team.

Wednesday was the biggest feature of the week with our Sprint Alpha event. It was a chance to show off everything that GDS has been doing with transactions across government. Filled with a mixture of civil servants, press, permanent secretaries and ministers we had a chance to update everyone on what we’ve been up to and what comes next. We’re working on 25 services across government, including 3 (view driving record, vehicle management and personalised registrations) at DVLA.

At the beginning of the week I took part in a workshop to look at abolishing the Counterpart Driving Licence (the piece of paper that comes with the plastic card). The counterpart contains additional information such as what you can drive (entitlements) and penalty points / disqualifications (endorsements).

It’s seen to be a fairly important piece of paper. If you drive a van for work, you can use it to prove to your employer that you can drive that type of vehicle. Similarly, if you hire a car you can use it to prove to the rental company that you can drive. There are lots of reasons why someone might need to see it. Unfortunately, lots of people misplace the counterpart or throw it away not realising they might need it and then have to get a replacement.

After a couple of very busy weeks things are starting to calm down and return to normal.

I spent more time on Monday with some of the team working on the DVLA IT transformation. We’re looking at ways to strangle down the complex legacy IT estate to make it simpler to maintain and to make it easier build new services. Given how complex and tightly coupled the existing systems are, this isn’t going to be a simple process.

After the last few manic weeks, this week was a chance to slow down a bit and take stock of everything that has been going on.

On Monday I and a bunch of technical colleagues met with the DVLA team leading on their ICT contract procurement (a piece of work to split up their existing IT estate). We took at look at the work their team is doing and made some suggestions on how to proceed.

A little late this week.

On Monday I got to spend a day visiting the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA) in Bristol. Amongst other things, VOSA look after the MOT service. They’ve got a small internal development team and some SMEs working on various internal tools and an alpha of a potential future MOT service. It’s fantastic to see this sort of thing happening in departments that are getting very little support from GDS.

Lots of progress this week.

The Department for Transport Digital Strategy published in December last year contained three transformation projects at the DVLA in Swansea. We started the first – the Integrated Enquiries Platform (IEP) – back in January. The other two (vehicles online and personalised registrations) hadn’t been started yet. Until this week.

On Monday and Tuesday we kicked off our ‘discovery‘ process for these two projects. We took over some space at the RLDC in Swansea, invited lots of people to talk to us and explain everything that might be related to the projects. We filled whiteboards and post-it notes with thoughts, diagrams and figures. By the time we left on the Tuesday we’d taken on a huge amount of information.

This has been a week filled with workshops.

On Monday I spent the day at the Richard Ley Development Centre (RLDC) in Swansea. The RLDC is the DVLA’s conference and training centre. It’s perfect for workshops and planning sessions – there is lots of space, lots of whiteboards and Wifi!

As part of the driving licence project I’ve been working on, we’ve been building a bunch of services to handle lots of queries against the DVLA’s driver databases. We spent Monday looking at the systems that currently (and might in the future) make queries for this data. The aim was to identify which services might be next to transfer over to the new platform.

The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. There’s been lots going on and I’ve been travelling to and from Swansea quite a bit. There’s also been a bank holiday, and a couple of days off.

Work on the driving licence service has continued. We finished sprint 8 and started sprint 9. The end of sprint show and tell was really well attended by staff from across the organisation. We’ve been concentrating on the public facing elements of the service recently so we could start user testing. We’ve now started spending more time on the backend services including the internal APIs, data services and auditing.

Last week was a very short week with both a bank holiday and a day of annual leave. Despite this it was probably more productive than previous weeks.

On Tuesday I attended a show and tell to see the work that’s been done over the last sprint. It’s great to see things starting to come together. We also had a general pre-sprint planning catch up and team retrospective.

On Wednesday we started the first round of user testing the online service. We tested with both DVLA staff in Swansea and members of the public in Birmingham. This round has highlighted some things we can change now to make the service simpler and confirmed some suspicions we had. It has also given us some things to investigate further – it’s important not to jump to conclusions from just one round of testing.

A number of people are starting to put together week notes about what they have been up to over the past 5 days of work. I want to give this a go too, partly so I can look back in a few months time and remind myself what has been achieved.

I probably won’t get round to writing these every week, but hopefully often enough that it makes sense.

Just over a year ago, I blogged that I was taking a break from CF Labs and joining a project to create a new website for government.

Since then lots of things have happened, and many things have changed. Here is a quick summary:

• The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to bring together many bits of government that were working on similar things, including the project to create the new website
• We released a public beta of our proposed new website for citizens (to replace Directgov). We followed this with a beta of a platform to replace all central government websites and an alpha of our design principles
• I got involved in, wrote and talked about the use of cookies on websites and the new law that has caused a lot of fuss
• I got to go to Number 10
• I left Consumer Focus and joined GDS full time as a developer and tech lead
• I spent a huge amount of time travelling from South Wales to London and staying in hotels
• I eventually stopped this madness and relocated from Cardiff to a flat in East London
• We released the first batch of things for businesses on the public beta
• We announced the date on which GOV.UK will replace both Directgov and BusinessLink – the two biggest government websites.

Over the last year, this blog has been very much unloved and has gathered an unhealthy layer of dust. It’s not for want of trying – there are several half finished posts that I just haven’t gotten around to finishing. I’m hoping I can resurrect some of these, but I suspect many are now too out of date.

Whenever there has been an extended gap in my blogging I try and find something to get it going again. It usually involves some kind of recap of the missing months to try and fill in the gap. This time is different only in the sheer amount of things that have happened. Over the last six months I’ve moved house, worked on (and launched) five major projects for CF Labs, begun work on three more and my employer has been abolished.

Unless it escaped your attention, Gordon Brown called the much anticipated UK General Election yesterday. It will take place on May 6th 2010.

In line with guidelines for civil service and other public sector employees, I will be curtailing my blogging and tweeting activities until after the election. If I do post anything, it won’t be about work.

You can view copies of the guidelines on the Cabinet Office website.

To find out more about the UK General Election and the voting process, take a look at the Electoral Commission and Parliament websites.