Support Overview
The Platform team is here to help you. Any questions unable to be answered from reviewing this page should be directed to the #vfs-platform-support Slack channel.
Support Overview
Support Slack channel
If you need assistance from someone on the Platform, see Getting help from the Platform in Slack.
Avoid direct messaging a Platform team member. Chatting openly in the #vfs-platform-support channel allows others to learn from the questions and answers discussed.
Support Request Policies
Support Hours of Operation
8:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday
Support Outside of Office Hours
The Platform Support Team does not provide 24-7 service. However, if there is an urgent alert from PagerDuty, our on-call contact responds.
Support Request Response Time
The average request response time is 3 business hours . We'll acknowledge that we received your support request within 3 business hours. The time it takes us to resolve your issue will depend on the complexity of the issue.
Support Request Scope
Support requests that take 30 minutes or less will be handled by the Platform Support Team.
Any requests exceeding 30 minutes of support engineer time will be escalated to a critical incident (see “Is my issue critical” below) or a feature request. To request priority escalation, you should communicate with your team’s OCTO-DE lead.
Pull Request Review Response Time
Standard Requests
PR Requests will be reviewed within 1 business day of submission.
Urgent Requests
Sometimes you may need a pull request review completed in less than 1 business day. We’ll do our best to accommodate urgent requests.
To request an urgent PR review, post in the #vfs-platform-support Slack channel. Be sure to explain:
why the PR review request is urgent
when you would like the PR reviewed by
The on-call support engineer will evaluate your request and let you know whether or not your PR can be reviewed by your desired deadline.
You only need to ask about a PR review in #vfs-platform-support if the PR review takes longer than 1 business day or if you need to request an urgent review.
Platform Engineering Reviews
To help ensure that we maintain consistent code quality and performance for the best user experience across VA.gov, we require that you have your work reviewed at certain points throughout your development cycle.
Pull Request Code Reviews
After your code is reviewed by another member of your team and before it's merged, your code must be reviewed by a Platform engineer.
For more information on code reviews, see Submitting pull requests for approval.
Security and Privacy Review
This review happens before you begin rolling out your new feature to ensure your feature meets DEPO platform privacy and security standards.
For information on requesting a security and privacy review meeting, see Privacy, security, infrastructure readiness review.
Resolve Critical Issues on the Trunk Branch
We always intend to keep our repositories deployable from trunk branches. VA.gov doesn't use release branches. We focus on keeping the trunk branches healthy. This means that problematic code in trunk branches should be resolved as quickly as possible.
Is My Issue Critical?
See Is my issue critical? for more information.
Fix Forward or Revert?
When an issue in a trunk branch is discovered, the following decision tree should be used to resolve it:
Default to reverting the PR that caused the problem.
Five minutes: Can the bug be fixed in under five minutes? Go for it. If not, revert the offending PR.
One try: If fixing forward was already attempted and other issues were discovered in the process, revert all involved PRs.
Request a New Release
See our deployment policies for initiating a new production release from the given trunk branch.
The Platform rarely uses binary rollbacks (deploying previously-deployed versions) because of database migration risks and frontend-backend dependencies. Exceptions must exclude database migrations in the affected commit range. Exceptions are requested with the out-of-band deploy policy.
Platform and VFS engineer roles and responsibilities
Platform code is divided into two categories: common code and application code.
Common code (and common code libraries) | Comprises behavior and functionality that's shared across applications |
Application code | Provides specific functionality for a VFS application |
Platform engineers are responsible for maintenance, detecting bugs, and performance in common code and libraries. VFS application teams are responsible for the quality of their FE and BE application code.
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.