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Guidelines

Standards and best practices organised by project lifecycle. Follow these guidelines to build services that meet Ministry of Justice and cross-government expectations.

1. Project Inception

Starting your project — understanding the problem, assessing feasibility, and planning your approach.

• Choosing a hosting platform— How to decide between Cloud Platform, Modernisation Platform, and other hosting options for your service.
• Dependabot guidelines— Guidelines for using Dependabot to manage dependencies and security updates.
• Preparing for service assessments— What to expect from GDS service assessments and how to prepare your team.
• GOV.UK Service Manual— GDS guidance on researching, designing, building, and running government services.
• Service Standard— The 14-point Service Standard that government services must meet.

2. Development & Iteration

Building your service — coding standards, security practices, and agile delivery.

• API design standards— RESTful API design principles, versioning strategy, error handling, and pagination patterns.
• Source control and branching— Git workflow standards, branch naming conventions, commit message formats, and code review expectations.
• Security in development— Secure coding practices, dependency scanning, secret management, and threat modelling for development teams.
• GDS API Technical & Data Standards— Cross-government standards for building and naming APIs, data formats, and integration patterns.
• NCSC Secure Development & Deployment— National Cyber Security Centre collection on secure development lifecycle, deployment, and supply chain security.

3. Technology Choice

Choosing the right tools — languages, frameworks, platforms, and open source.

• Making technology choices— Framework for evaluating and choosing programming languages, frameworks, and tools for your service.
• Coding in the open— When and how to make your code open source. Licensing, sensitive data, and the benefits of working in the open.
• Technology Code of Practice— Cross-government guidance on how to design, build, and buy technology.
• GOV.UK Design System— Styles, components, and patterns for designing government services.

4. Standards & Best Practices

Cross-cutting standards — accessibility, security, incident management, and operational excellence.

• Accessibility requirements— WCAG 2.2 AA compliance requirements, testing approach, and accessibility statements for government services.
• AI Governance Framework— MoJ guidance on responsible AI use — risk assessment, transparency, accountability, and ethical considerations.
• Incident management— How to handle production incidents — severity levels, communication, runbooks, and post-incident reviews.
• NCSC Cloud Security Guidance— National Cyber Security Centre principles for securing cloud-hosted services.

5. Measuring Success

Understanding impact — metrics, monitoring, service health, and user satisfaction.

• Measuring service health— Key metrics, SLIs/SLOs, monitoring dashboards, and how to report on service performance.
• Measuring service performance— GDS guidance on KPIs, cost per transaction, user satisfaction, and digital take-up.