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How to Go Live

Things to pay attention to when going live

Before the service moves into the live phase, you’ll need to show that you’ve used the beta phase to build a service that meets the needs you identified at discovery and prototyping, testing, and iterating based on what you learn.

This should be coordinated with the client organization to decide what is required to release the software to all users. While they should be coordinated early and often, directly before going live, the following may occur:

  • security assessments (e.g. penetration tests, securing your Authority to Operate)
  • accessibility audits
  • performance testing

Other things to consider before you go live

Before the service goes live, you’ll also need to make sure:

  • you’re securing the service’s information
  • you’ve got appropriate metrics in place to measure the success of the service, based on what you’ve learned during beta
  • the service meets accessibility requirements you’re able to maintain uptime and availability and monitor the status of the service
  • you’re able to continue with vulnerability and penetration testing
  • you’re able to continue testing service performance
  • you’re able to maintain quality testing and code coverage
  • you have addressed, or have plans to address, any pain points that might lead people who use your service to be excluded

Iterating in live

The live phase is about supporting the service in a sustainable way, and continuing to iterate and make improvements. It is about continuing to iterate towards solving a whole problem for users.

This means your team will continue to:

  • work with teams responsible for related services
  • address any constraints you identified in beta (for example with legacy technology
  • learn from real usage including metrics and user research
  • make sure that transactions are scoped in a way that makes sense to users
  • identify common software patterns that can be open-sourced
  • transition or integrate any existing transactions that meet a similar need to yours

You may find these guides useful:

Source Credit: This content is an edited reprint from the GOV.UK Service Manual under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0.