18F Blog

Maturing your design research practice is a bit like honing your skills at cooking. Experienced researchers rely on a refined set of sensibilities, or tastes, in their use and application of research methods; they create, curate, and refine informational recipes that turn raw data into palatable insights. And just like cooking, everyone can improve in their research abilities with a bit of reflective practice

If you’re building a rules-based system, don’t assume that you need a separate business rules engine product. Rules can be implemented more easily and with less overhead by cross-functional teams working to describe the rules and policy directly in code using a general purpose programming language like Python, Ruby, etc.

As agencies try to adopt agile development practices and modular contracting methods, there are several anti-patterns that we have noticed through the course of our work. We address how these can hinder success and alternatives to consider.

At many government agencies, a central IT team manages DNS directly. Other teams must request changes using help desk tickets, which can have inconsistent turnaround times, and are susceptible to human error. Having DNS records as code and doing changes through pull requests brought turnaround time down from multiple days to under ten minutes.