Developer Coaching for the Legal Aid Agency

Tender description

Summary of the work A small team (2-4) senior developers to embed in and coach the LAA development team and help modern development practices. They should teach the team using whatever medium is appropriate to their needs, whether identifying formal training needs, or through pairing, documentation and guidance, leading, code review, or other means. Expected Contract Length 4-6 months Latest start date Monday 26 February 2018 Why the Work is Being Done The Legal Aid Agency is moving all its systems to public cloud hosting and modernising them as they go. Many members of the current team have limited experience of modern development practices including continuous integration, continuous deployment, devops and test driven development. To maintain and improve the systems when moving to the cloud, the team will need to be well versed in these techniques. Problem to Be Solved The team require day-to-day support and coaching in how to work with a broad range of systems in modern ways using tools and practices including git and GitHub, test driven development, continuous integration and deployment, devops, and more. The systems the team support and maintain include large Oracle databases, old Java applications, and some more modern Python and Ruby applications. Therefore, language expertise is less important than solid understanding of how to coach people in modern development techniques. Who Are the Users As a developer in the LAA building/maintaining a service, I need to understand: - modern development practices so that I can improve our codebases and make them easier to maintain, manage, and change. - know how to use modern version control systems, branching/merging strategies so I can work well with my team on our codebases. - how to work with continuous deployment pipelines so our services can be iterated rapidly and safely. - how to introduce and maintain robust automated test suites to new and existing codebases so we can have more confidence that changes we make aren’t breaking things. Work Already Done A team already exists to do the bulk of the migration to the cloud whilst doing some modernisation as they go. This team will also be doing some handover, but will expect certain levels of proficiency in modern development practices in the recipients. The wider MOJ development and architecture community are also working with the LAA developers to identify areas for improvement and formal learning. Existing Team Technical Architects, Developers, and others from various disciplines across both the LAA and the wider MOJ. Current Phase Not applicable Skills & Experience • Experience coaching and mentoring developers in the use of modern development practices • Experience using languages such as Java, Ruby, and Python within an existing production codebase • Experience introducing continuous deployment practices and deployment pipelines to existing legacy codebases • Experience with distributed version control systems • Experience and ability to develop development tooling and automation for testing/deployment where appropriate • Experience working in multidisciplinary agile teams • - Evidence/examples of a rigorous approach to software development (TDD, code review, pairing) Nice to Haves • - Experience of GitHub-based development workflows, using pull requests, code review, and continuous integration • - Experience of commodity cloud providers such as AWS (EC2 and RDS) in a production system • - Interest in devops, and infrastructure as code • - Experience with Oracle databases, and applying devops practices (test automation, continuous delivery, etc.) to managing them Work Location Mostly based at 102 Petty France, London, SW1H 9AJ with some remote working where appropriate. Working Arrangments Onsite most of the time (Monday - Friday) with some remote working. Security Clearance BPSS (Minimum) Additional T&Cs Standard Contract Terms and Conditions No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 8 Proposal Criteria • Approach and methodology • How the approach or solution meets your organisation’s policy or goal • How they’ve identified risks and dependencies and offered approaches to manage them • Team structure Cultural Fit Criteria • Can work with clients with out of date technical expertise. • Challenge the status quo. • Be comfortable standing up for their discipline. • Be transparent and collaborative when making decisions. • Have a no-blame culture and encourage people to learn from their mistakes. • Share knowledge and experience with other team members. Payment Approach Capped time and materials Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 50% Cultural fit 20% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers 1. There have been issues with the MoJ receiving supplier questions for this DoS requirement. Please can you send your questions directly to Rich.silver@digital.justice.gov.uk. I will ensured these are answered today.