Weeknote 4

With the public holidays and some people on the team taking a well deserved break it feels as though this has been a short week. Our main focus has continued to be around local plan timetables.

Last week we mentioned that we’ve been working on a draft specification for local plan timetables. This week we’ve added a couple of things to that specification.

Field descriptions

We’ve added some descriptions to each of the fields to provide some additional context about what each thing represents.

The content for each description is contained within the raw specification file. This means that we can potentially reuse that content in multiple places such as technical documentation, guidance pages or other places online.

Experimenting with specification diagrams

We’ve also been experimenting with ways to produce diagrams that represent the specifications.

Until now we’ve been making these by hand so being able to generate these diagrams directly from the specification will be a help.

They aren’t quite right (especially when trying to show how all the specifications relate to each other) but it feels like a good start.

Testing the specification

We feel like the specification for local plan timetables is at a point where it can be tested to see whether a) data from the real world will actually fit in the model; b) whether once we have some data we’re able to meet the user needs that have been identified.

Our plan is to run a collaborative session with colleagues in the local plans policy team to try and gather as much data as we can. We’re envisioning that during this exercise we’ll likely come across some scenarios that will be worth talking through and seeing whether we need to iterate our thinking on the specification.

To help with this exercise we’ve started to build a simple one page application similar to the approach we did for testing the collection of housing numbers data.