001: Initial architecture decisions

Ruby on Rails

  • Well established and commonly used within MHCLG and GOV.UK in general
  • Good ecosystem for common web app tasks, quick productivity
  • Matches team skill set
  • Analysis/RAP pipelines will sit in the DAP platform and not this application directly so optimising for web framework tasks makes sense.

Testing

  • Rspec for unit testing
  • Capybara or Cypress-Rails for front end testing
  • TDD or ATDD approach
  • No specific code coverage target or deploy gate as we feel this leads to arbitrary metric chasing and is counter-productive

Front end

  • In the same app codebase
  • ERB templates

Code style and linting

  • GOV.UK Rubocop for Ruby style
  • .editorconfig for whitespace, newlines etc

Ways of working

  • Flexible approach to branching. Generally Trunk based CI (every TDD round results in a commit and push to master) when pairing, branches and PR when doing solo or more exploratory work.
  • Github actions for automated test, build, deploy pipeline
  • Github actions should run Rubocop, RSpec, Front end tests, docker build and deploy
  • Encourage pairing