About this guide

At 18F, We empower our partners to create better digital experiences for the people of the United States. As engineers at 18F, we are federal employees who help other government agencies build, buy, and share technology products. This guide is meant as a resource for 18F engineers on how we approach technical issues. As part of working in the open, we share this guide publicly so that others can learn how we approach our work.

Our approach:

Putting user experience first

We have amazing designers and strategists who are skilled in fulfilling the needs of the people who will use your product or service. We collaborate with them on creating the best way to serve our users.

Reducing risk with agile practices

We use agile methodologies (usually SCRUM or Kanban) to achieve our goals and model how an agile, cross-functional team works. Being agile allows us to implement DevOps best practices, adjust to what we learn as we proceed, and tighten feedback loops.

Open source

Delivering open source software helps ensure quality, security and reusability. It's also an additional way to encourage community involvement in government services.

Updates

Getting new practices into the guide is pretty light on process. Feel free to raise a topic in Slack or at a guild meeting and drive to some consensus. Once you've done that, document your findings, submit a PR, and ask in #18f-engineering for a quick review. If you think a proposal might be controversial after getting some consensus prior, please post the draft PR to #18f-engineering (and elsewhere if you don’t think target audience is in that channel) and solicit feedback.

How we classify best practices

These documents are structured by topic; under topics we have classified we indicate "Requirement", "Standard", "Default", "Suggestion", and "Caution".

If a classification is not present on a topic or a reference to a tool or practice, it should be presumed to be a Suggestion and the decision is left at your discretion. If you are unsure, ask in #dev, as the topic or tool may be a good candidate for classification.

Requirement indicates practices that must be done for regulatory, legal, compliance, or other reasons.

Standard signifies practices that have a strong consensus across 18F; they should generally be followed to ease the ATO process and make on-boarding simpler.

Default practices are safe selections that tend to be used by a large number of our projects; you may find yourself with a better or more tailored solution, however.

Suggestion indicates examples that have worked well on a project or two; they're not widely used enough to be defaults, but are worth considering.

Caution marks approaches that have significant pitfalls or should not be used for security/compliance reasons.

If a specific classification is not present on a topic or reference to a tool or practice, it should be presumed to be a Suggestion .

All references to specific brands, products, and/or companies are used only for illustrative or descriptive purposes and do not imply endorsement by the U.S. federal government or any federal government agency.