Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 15
15
The programme suspended an attempted roll-out of the Border Crossing system in March 2020.28 The...
Conclusion
The programme suspended an attempted roll-out of the Border Crossing system in March 2020.28 The system had difficulty operating reliably at scale, with stability problems causing it to be available for only 54% of the days that it was supposed to be available, and roll-out limitations meaning that it was only available to 783 users out of a required 7,000.29 The programme started the latest roll-out of Border Crossing at the beginning of December after attempting to fix these difficulties. The latest roll-out has so far been available 98% of the time. While this is an improvement on previous performance, the Department has set a requirement of 99.93% to be met by April 2021.30
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
4: PAC conclusion: The Department has struggled to deliver the core technical components of the Digital Services at the Border programme. 4a: PAC recommendation: The Department should set out what it has done to resolve the problems it has had with the technical components of the programme and…… 4.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Recommendation implemented 4.2 The department has implemented agile working methodologies and has access to a specialist technical resource framework to acquire the right people for the right piece of work. The department has also ensured that: • the Border Crossing product has been migrated to a new more robust platform and refactored scalability to provide High availability; • the “secret data” (S*) side of the solution has been refactored and then re-imagined to overcome the technical issues of the first iteration; • logging and monitoring is deployed as standard on every service, to provide effective feedback; • Site Reliability Engineering is part of the engineering ethos which has been applied to provide consistent patterns and designs to support a highly available and resilient service; • all requirements are defined, tracked and monitored; and • performance testing is a key part of every release cycle.