VA.gov | Documentation

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A knowledge hub for building on VA.gov

Connecting you to documentation, tools, and resources to help you as you work.

Practice area quick links

Engineering
Accessing staging
Infrastructure
Platform code review guidelines
Review instances
Feature toggles
Frontend dev on VA.gov
Design doc template
Deployment policy and release freezes
VA.gov forms system
Quality Assurance
QA Artifact List
Manual testing
End-to-end tests
Load testing
Using Testrail
Unit tests
VSP QA Philosophy
Contract Testing
Research
Research plan template
Conversation guide template
Observer guidelines
Readout template
Discovery sprints
Archive of research projects
Design
Design system website
Working with the design system
Form design process
Design review critique guidelines
Using test accounts
Design system pattern library (Sketch file download)
Content
VA.gov content style guide
Content and plain language best practices
Error message dictionary
Error message styleguide
Form content process
Form labels
User starting points and calls to action
Information Architecture (IA)
Redirect process
SEO best practices
General IA best practices on VA.gov
Current IA reviews for reference
Site maps
Accessibility
Accessibility best practices
508 checklist
Staging review requirements
Getting started with screen reader testing
Using VoiceOver to check for accessibility issues on MacOS
Accessibility defect severity rubric
Analytics and Insights
Working with VSP Analytics and Insights
Request analytics review
Google Analytics tagging process
KPI setting protocol
Contact center review process
Contact center triage process
Product Management
Product development checklist
Product outline template
Release plan template
Go/no go meeting template
Platform collaboration point tracker

Working with the Veteran-facing Service Platform (VSP)

The mission of VSP is to provide a framework comprised of systems, tools, processes, documentation, and customer support, that helps Veteran-facing Services (VFS) Teams create successful VA.gov products.
Welcome to VSP
Platform principles
VSP Collaboration Cycle
VSP Calendar
Product development checklist
Is something on VA.gov broken?
Report an incident

Getting Started

Policies and guidelines

va.gov-team documentation repository guidelines
Sensitive documentation guidance

VA.gov products

See all VA.gov product documentation

Systems and tools

Get access to tools (GitHub, Zenhub, Slack, SOCKS, and more)
Set up frontend
Set up backend

Commonly used repositories

va.gov-team

This public repository is used to store non-code documents and files created and used by teams building the VSP and VFSs.

vets-website

Frontend for VA.gov

vets-api

API powering VA.gov

va.gov-team-sensitive

Private extension of the va.gov-team repo for issues and documentation that should not be publicly visible.