e-petitions: how we built it

Earlier this year the Agile Delivery Network completed their first project for Government Digital Service (GDS). It’s the Government e-petitions service, which replaces the old Number 10 petitions website run by the previous government. Time to talk about the architecture, how we set the team up and the effect the project is having within government.

The project

The project was overseen and run by Skunkworks, the new innovation arm of the GDS that specialises in quick projects with small teams. We put together a team consisting of three developers, a designer, a tester/project manager. Also on the team was our customer and an analyst to help with the site copy and training the staff who will be moderating petitions.

We originally started the project at the very beginning of June 2011, knowing that we only had six weeks to get the site live. We ran three two-week iterations, during which requirements shifted around as the important deliverables came into focus.

There were a number of major technical hurdles. We spent a lot of time getting the accessibility of the site right, and tweaking the feel of the search feature. Getting the site hosted was difficult: it’s not straightforward finding website hosting for a government website that collects personal data.

Whilst we tried to find the right place to host the site, we spent a lot of time using Chef to test our build configuration on Amazon EC2. When the hosting came online, it was relatively simple (thankfully) to deploy the site to the production environment, as we’d already prepared all the configuration scripts in advance.

The tech

We built the site in Ruby on Rails, with a MySQL and a Solr search backend. It’s running in production on two application servers, through nginx for static content with unicorn at the backend. There is one dedicated DB server, and one dedicated Solr server. Our JMeter testing showed that we may not need the dedicated Solr server, so that might also share CPU with a read-only MySQL slave in future if the site traffic gets heavier.

For server configuration, we’re running a customised version of chef-solo on each of the servers, bootstrapped with a little bespoke script. We didn’t want to set up a chef server as we didn’t get the hosting environment set up until quite late in the day, and we didn’t want an external server with access to the production environment.

Chef turned out to be very useful. It was very satisfying to watch all the scripts we’d built on EC2 “just work” (well, almost) on the live environment. The combination of using Nginx + Unicorn was also a clear highlight

The reaction

The site has been well received by those outside government, but perhaps just as importantly the way that we ran the project caused a bit of a stir within Whitehall too. Agile projects are still rare in government, and IT spending is a hot topic right now. It’s great that people are beginning to think about how to deliver software in better ways and the guys at Skunkworks are doing really well at promoting agile methods internally.

We hope you like the site and enjoy using it. If you have a similar requirement for a site which needs to be completed with challenging timescales, do get in touch.

Who we are

“We should never forget that leadership only happens when we as a community put a real solution on the table, a better way of doing things that gives our leaders the courage to work on things that matter, to become the risk takers and doers, to make the change that we all seek.

A few dedicated people, working on things that matter, can move something even so massive as the ship of state.

If we beleive we can make Government more efficient, more effective, more just, we must practice our craft until we can swim with the currents of our time.”

Carl Malamud ~ The Currents Of Our Time.
Address to the Government 2.0 Summit, Washington, D.C., September 7, 2010

Members of the Agile Delivery Network believe that

IT delivery in the UK Government is broken and
The current supplier model doesn’t work

We are passionate about working with Government to help change this. We hope to be part of a transformation that results in:

• faster and more effective delivery of UK public Sector IT and IT related services;
• a significant reduction in the massive waste inherent in the legacy approach;
• the enabling of continuous evolution of systems to meet the needs of the public.

We aim to do this through:

Advocacy – of a collaborative, iterative approach to software delivery; Enabling continuous learning and improvement to increase the effectiveness of IT delivery, it’s associated organisations, management and project teams

Paid Work – to demonstrate effective software delivery, to educate in agile and associated practices and approach, to participate in organisations and project teams, to collaborate and facilitate creative and valuable ways of solving the complex problems that the public Sector faces.

Research – by collating a wide range of available materials and creating papers, case studies and other media into a potent online resource.

Participation – by becoming part of the Government IT circle, reviewing suggested approaches and ideas, responding, challenging and contributing.

Partnership – with successful, best of breed agile product and service companies, and agile organisations.

This is done in the spirit of service, with the immediate customer being the Government and the ultimate customer being the UK taxpayer. We believe in quality and it is paramount that any product of the ADN or interaction with customers reflects that quality.

Our Membership is composed of:

Software Development Companies and Individuals that can demonstrate successful agile delivery

Companies and Individuals that can work to enable organisational and procurement change

Individuals that can donate time to advocacy, research and participation

Getting the Little Guys In

This paper, prepared by the Agile Development Network, describes an option for extending the involvement of small to medium sized enterprises (SME’s) in ICT projects. It is a contribution to the wider debate on how to deliver greater success and benefits from public sector ICT expenditure.

Getting the Little Guys In

Agile Delivery Network

In  June we wrote this paper in response to a Cabinet Office request for information on the purpose of the Agile Delivery Network.

We accompanied it with this case study on the successful use of Agile in a project for Her Majesty’s Court Service by one of the ADN member companies, processfour.