The benefits of a platform approach for a growing VA team base

The challenge

The platform allows VA teams to build consumer-quality, accessible, user-friendly digital products and services for Veterans and their caregivers. And it keeps these various products and services available, stable, and secure.

But establishing a new platform required focus from the platform teams, and it had to be done without interrupting application teams' ongoing work in the same, shared codebase. New technology and governance requirements could easily create much more work for application teams.

To allow for scalability, we also had to address a variety of concerns, including how we would:

1. Sustain high quality (design consistency, accessibility compliance, security, usability) given that app development would be spread across teams on different contracts

2. Handle many teams working on the same codebase

3. Communicate across teams how processes should work

What we did

While the platform infrastructure team maintained existing VA.gov infrastructure services, they began building the new platform’s structure. They also established support rotations, nominating one engineer each week to answer requests from application teams. This kept application teams unblocked while enabling the rest of the platform team to focus on building the new platform.

To scale application development without reducing quality, the platform team established governance processes that application teams had to pass. To help keep quality high without adding that burden entirely on application teams, the platform team developed a central design system and a forms library for easy building of user interfaces that met the VA’s accessibility and design requirements — the “carrot” to ease the “stick” of those requirements. Together, these helped establish application quality across teams and enforce best practices, including consistent design, usability, security, and accessibility compliance.

Documentation and support helped to further guarantee consistency and accelerate development. The success of the VA platform depends on connecting people to the right information so they know what tools, software, and support are available to them and what’s required as they design, build, and deploy.

We established continuous deployment pipelines that push code to staging environments immediately and to production daily. This deployment cadence allows application teams to continually test small updates with end users and easily roll back functionality when problems are detected.

Ad Hoc built common platform services and infrastructure for VA.gov to support the many applications designed for Veterans. The team provided solutions to common infrastructure needs like application monitoring, aggregated logging, and continuous integration. They also addressed recurring needs like verifying Veteran identity and text messaging services for notifying Veterans.

The platform team also created application “starter kits” that provide a runway for new development teams to adopt platform services with ease. These kits generate shell applications for the front and back ends and API stubs on the back end where calls are monitored and logged to existing observability systems. This helps speed application teams down the path of using the platform services effectively and lets them focus on building value-added business logic.

Outcomes

The transformation of VA.gov into a platform ecosystem has helped the VA evolve from an environment with four sprint teams building Veteran-facing features on VA.gov in 2019 to almost 30 sprint teams simultaneously building applications on the platform as of October 2022.

It has also produced increasingly positive experiences for its users. For example, 57% of respondents to a Q3 2020 satisfaction survey reported favorable views of the platform products. In Q3 2022, that percentage increased to 74%.

Because of this work, the VA has a platform that is more than just technical infrastructure for engineers. It provides tools and resources for product managers, quality assurance specialists, and researchers. It has provided the VA with both time and cost savings, and they’ve benefited from outcomes we typically see across well-implemented technical platforms:

• Improve system security and stability by consolidating expertise for best practice infrastructure, observability, and data security into a central platform infrastructure, rather than requiring development teams to independently locate, develop, and apply that expertise for each application.
• Build and deploy more quickly by solving common problems once instead of requiring each team to solve them separately for each software project.
• Create long-term maintainability by reducing overall complexity in the ecosystem of software projects the library manages.
• Develop a culture of modern software practices by defining best practices in infrastructure, making the right thing the easiest thing for developers.
• Increase focus on shipping business value by freeing developers to spend less time on creating and maintaining infrastructure, less time context switching across the full software stack, and more time discovering and iterating on features that deliver value to users.
• Accelerate team onboarding and cross-team collaboration by providing new teams and new projects with a common starting point to build on.