This week I started integrating.

Not on a personal level: it’s almost been a year and I think we’ve comfortably crossed that line. I’m talking about integrating services 

At the start of the year, we set up an “Integrations Team” who are responsible for designing and building APIs between our services. The (/an) intended benefit is that they don’t really worry about what happens in each service, but just define the contract and shared data. This should unblock individual service teams developing dependent features.

The integrations team is still in early days (it’s only been a few weeks), but things are clipping along at a fair pace. They’ve published a bunch of standards (in the form of ADRs), built infrastructure, and provided early drafts of contracts.

As a result, we’re having to get our skates on in the service teams. So I’ve spent a lot of time this week communicating with and through Integrations colleagues, designing new features, and worrying about handling edge cases and downtime.

The plan is that next week we’ll agree how we’ll design and build our end of the integration, and start building it for real next sprint. We’ll also hook up our healthcheck page to the API’s to ensure the piping works.

As I say, things are still nascent for this new way of working, but I’m optimistic about having a centralised team. It should unlock us having a common language across services, and moving forward together rather than at a product level.

Summary

• Started designing our document API integration
• Reinstated some API security that had been found lacking
• Built a scheduled cleanup task to tidy up inside users
• Tidied up a bunch of dodgy data in production
• Supported developing multi-organisation and GOV.UK Notify support
• Continued to think about our major Symfony upgrade later this year