Development Methods

In general, our approach to engineering is to follow modern good practice, which is essentially common across government and commercial sectors.

Considerations in Government Environments

With new projects, we are often inheriting a product and codebase that has some minor or major technical debt. We are often in the mode of improving system health as we support the systems.
We must align to customer rules for approved technologies. In government, the FedRAMP program maintains a list of technologies that meet most government requirements. However, each agency has their own process for approving which technologies can be used, which is usually the product of security concerns and licensing investments.

Consistent with the "scouting rule" and our principle of "Lean into Digital Services" - every time we are touching a system, we should be looking for the small or big ways to make it technically better.
We use cloud-native architectures, which in government is most commonly deployed on the AWS or Azure platforms, but sometimes on GCP or Cloud.gov. However, containerization and technologies like Kubernetes allow some consistency across platforms.
We prefer well-establish and well-supported open-source tech stacks. That has included web frameworks like React, Angular, Java SpringBoot, Node, Ruby on Rails, Python Django/FastAPI.
We value good technical design of solutions to include: excellent accessibility following Section 508 guidelines, proper use of HTML tags, good API design and documentation, etc.
We automate repetitive tasks to reduce toil.