About this guide

Technology Transformation Services (TTS) — which includes 18F, Centers of Excellence (CoE), Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF), and TTS Solutions — promote best practices across specialty areas through guilds.

Getting new practices into the guide is pretty light on process. Feel free to raise a topic in Slack or at a guild meeting and drive to some consensus. Once you've done that, document your findings, submit a PR, and ask in #dev for a quick review. If you think a proposal might be controversial after getting some consensus prior, please post the draft PR to #dev (and elsewhere if you don’t think target audience is in that channel) and solicit feedback.

How we classify best practices

These documents are structured by topic; under topics we have classified we indicate "Requirement", "Standard", "Default", "Suggestion", and "Caution".

If a classification is not present on a topic or a reference to a tool or practice, it should be presumed to be a Suggestion and the decision is left at your discretion. If you are unsure, ask in #dev, as the topic or tool may be a good candidate for classification.

Requirement indicates practices that must be done for regulatory, legal, compliance, or other reasons.

Standard signifies practices that have a strong consensus across TTS; they should generally be followed to ease the ATO process and make on-boarding simpler.

Default practices are safe selections that tend to be used by a large number of our projects; you may find yourself with a better or more tailored solution, however.

Suggestion indicates examples that have worked well on a project or two; they're not widely used enough to be defaults, but are worth considering.

Caution marks approaches that have significant pitfalls or should not be used for security/compliance reasons.

If a specific classification is not present on a topic or reference to a tool or practice, it should be presumed to be a Suggestion .