This site documents the architecture principles, standards and guidance that we expect teams working within the Department for Education (DfE) to follow when designing services.
It complements the GDS Service Manual and its technology section, which covers service design more broadly.
It should be used in conjunction with the DfE Digital Technical Guidance, when building digital services.
Create a new Markdown (.md) file in the DfE Architecture repo that follows this pattern, add a link to it from this page, and make a pull request:
---
category: The broader area this fits into
expires: yyyy-mm-dd (6 months from now)
---
# What you're writing about
Introduction of a couple of paragraphs to explain why what you're
writing about is important. The [title should probably be a verb, not a
noun](https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2015/06/22/good-services-are-verbs-2/) (e.g. "Storing source code", not "Code
repositories").
## User needs
Why do we do this? Who is it helping?
## Principles
What broad approaches do we follow when we do this?
## Tools
What specific software (commercial or open source) do we use to help us do this?The service manual has some useful information on learning about and writing user needs.