MOJ technical guidance

This site documents some of the technical decisions that the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) has made for the products we operate.

It complements the Service Manual, which covers service design more broadly.

Important:  Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is the name given to data which could be used (directly or indirectly) to identify an individual.

Examples of PII include a birthdate, race, passport/NI number.

On security grounds you must never upload any PII to an MOJ GitHub repository.

Principles

• Development Principles
• Frontend Development Principles

Governance

• MOJ Engineering AI Governance Framework

• TDA Submission Template - Architectural Alignment

• TDA Submission Template - Security Alignment

• TDA Submission Template - Data Alignment

Standards

Operating services

• Avoiding code freezes
• Documenting how your service is supported
• How to host services
• Supporting services out of hours

Building software

• Justice Digital front end engineering standards
• Justice Digital software engineering standards
• Licensing software or code
• Naming things

General standards

• Using 3rd-party open source products

Adding new guidance

Create a new Markdown file that follows this pattern, add a link to it from this page, and make a pull request:

---
title: The Title of Your Page
last_reviewed_on: 2020-08-05
review_in: 3 months
---

# The Title of Your Page

Introduction of a couple of paragraphs to explain why the thing you're
writing about is important. The [title should probably be a verb, not a
noun][good-services-are-verbs] (e.g. “Storing source code”, not “Code
repositories”).

[good-services-are-verbs]: https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2015/06/22/good-services-are-verbs-2/

## User needs

Why do we do this thing? Who is it helping?

## Principles

What broad approaches do we follow when we do this thing?

## Tools

What specific bits of software (commercial or open source) do
we use to help us do this thing?

The service manual has some useful information on learning about and writing user needs.

This page was last reviewed on 10 July 2025. It needs to be reviewed again on 10 October 2025 by the page owner #operations-engineering-alerts .