Platform tools
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The VA.gov Platform provides several tools to help you build quality, stable, reliable digital experiences for Veterans. Some of the tools the Platform provides are “home-grown” at the VA to meet our specific needs. Others are 3rd party tools selected by the Platform.
We’re continually iterating to make it easier for you to build better, faster. In the future, we plan to eliminate the need for you to access some of these tools directly. Until then, this is the full list of Platform tools.
🧦 – requires access to our SOCKS proxy server. To learn how to access tools using the SOCKS proxy, see Internal tools access via SOCKS proxy.
– managed by the VA CTO office. The Platform may have processes and guidelines for the use of the tools, but we do not own them and can’t provide full support without VA involvement. For example, getting access to the OCTO Slack workspace requires assigning a ticket to a VA employee.
Communication and collaboration tools
All Platform issues must use Github.
All artifacts submitted for review to Platform must be stored in Github va.gov-team or va.gov-team-sensitive repos or otherwise publicly accessible.
Platform does not have any requirements for how VFS teams track their internal issues.
Platform Team Members do not use email except to schedule meetings. Unless you’re scheduling a meeting, communicate with other Platform Team Members on Slack.
Tool | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
ZenHub | Project management tool used by the Platform. | |
Chrome Extension: ZenHub | Helps you make use of integrated ZenHub options and extensions. Add the ZenHub for GitHub extension in the Chrome webstore | |
Slack | Messaging app used by everyone who works on VA.gov. | |
GitHub | Used for VA.gov product documentation. | |
Mural | A VA Enterprise account available for VFS Teams to use. This requires access to VA.gov email address. |
Analytics and insights tools
Tool | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
Google Analytics | Web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. | |
Domo | KPI dashboard tool that pulls in data from various sources. | |
Medallia | VA.gov survey data. Replaced Foresee. |
Design and research tools
Tool | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
VA.gov Design System | Guidance, standards, and tools to help teams build a consistent, intuitive, and Veteran-centered experience across VA.gov. | |
Figma | Digital design tool used for UX and UI design. VA.gov design system library is Figma-compatible. | |
Research Repo | Used for documenting research. | |
OCTO Research Session Calendar | The Google calendar where Perigean books all research sessions. | |
Optimal Workshop | Optimal Workshop provides research methods you need to test your user experiences. | |
Mural | A VA Enterprise account available for VFS Teams to use. This requires access to va.gov email address. |
Development tools
Platform-built tools
Tool | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
vets-api repo | Backend for VA.gov. | |
vets-website repo | Frontend for VA.gov. | |
VFS Toolkit (VTK) | Ruby gem that helps engineers to quickly start developing on VA.gov. Provides a command line interface that allows the use of simple commands and parameters to do everything from setting up a development environment to building out a directory structure and creating necessary files for separating code into its own module. | |
Forms Library | VA.gov Forms Library provides a simple way to create a consistent experience for complex forms for Veterans | |
React Component Library | Documentation and examples of VA.gov UI design system components. | |
Feature Toggles | Can be used in both |
Third-party tools
Tool | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
AWS console | AWS cloud access management. |
|
Drupal | The VA.gov Content Management System (CMS) Drupal 8. It acts as a Content API for the WEB application, and a CMS for VA.gov Content Team. | |
GitHub Actions | CI/CD. Developer workflow automation. Allows you to build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. | |
GitHub Desktop | Desktop Git client that allows us to work with the GitHub-hosted VA repositories. It addition to a UI, it also installs the Git command-line client. | |
Jenkins | Automation and deployment. Transitioning to GitHub actions for CI and ArgoCD for CD purposes. | |
Argo CD | Argo CD automates and manages the deployment of applications to Kubernetes. Vets-api is is deployed from Argo CD. | |
Visual Studio Code | IDE to modify and debug code, especially front-end React, but also back-end Ruby/Rails. Sticking to this popular IDE makes it easier to recommend and standardize code-assist/quality extensions (plug-ins). | |
AWS Parameter store | Used for managing secrets. | |
Credstash | Used for managing secrets and configuration values. Legacy tool. All new secrets or configuration values should be stored in AWS SSM Parameter Store | |
Docker | App containerization tool. Needed to run Ruby, Postgres and all the necessary tools to execute the VA APIs. | |
pgAdmin | PostgreSQL Tools. Used to interact with Postgres database sessions. You can use PGAdmin to perform database administration required for a Postgres database. | |
Postgres | Database engine used for the API | |
Postman | Needed to test and develop REST APIs. | |
Sidekiq | An open source job scheduler written in Ruby. Sidekiq jobs execute background processes for Ruby applications. | |
Google Chrome | Needed for frontend development plug-ins. | |
Homebrew | Recommended for installing NVM | |
Storybook | A user interface development environment and playground for UI components. | |
GitHub | A web-based version-control and collaboration platform. |
Monitoring tools
Tool | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
Datadog | Backend system metrics. | |
AWS CloudWatch | Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service. | |
PagerDuty | Incident management platform that provides reliable notifications, automatic escalations, on-call scheduling, and other functionality to help teams detect and fix infrastructure problems quickly. | |
StatsD | Used to aggregate and summarize application metrics. | |
Sentry | Error monitoring |
Testing tools
Tool | Description | Links |
|---|---|---|
Chrome Extension: redux devtools | Debugging application state changes. Used by developers writing e2e tests, to record information entered on forms. | |
Cypress | End-to-end (e2e) testing framework. Cypress tests run in the browser and programmatically simulate a real user using a web application, or product. | |
Locust | Open source load testing tool. | |
Review Instances | Use review instances to preview and demo changes before deploying to production. | |
Test User Dashboard | Allows you to search for test user accounts that you can use to log in to VA.gov applications and features for testing purposes. | |
TestRail | Test case management tool. Requires an account in the Platform TestRail instance. | |
Chrome Extension: axe DevTools | 508 accessibility scanning: required. Catch accessibility issues during development before they are flagged by the build. | |
Chrome Extension: Lighthouse | 508 accessibility scanning: recommended. Audits for web performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO | |
NVDA | Screen reader tool for Windows. | |
VoiceOver | Screen reader built into Apple Inc.'s macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and iPod operating systems |
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.