Organising evidence, with an API as the benchmark

The context

At the Dutch National Police, the team was responsible for an application to organise evidence and manage access rights to it. At the end, the team handed its knowledge over to a police team.

The problem

A complex existing application, a team that would take over the back end, and users with specific needs: the new foundation had to work for all of them.

The approach

Aart researched the system requirements and user needs, prioritised them and translated them through user testing into a detailed API design.

1. 1

   Designed a REST API in Swagger (OpenAPI 3), optimised for the front end, with partial responses as a kind of simplified GraphQL.

2. 2

   Set up a new Angular project, built on what users needed.

3. 3

   Sped up the CI/CD pipeline from 18 to 6 minutes with caching and other optimisations, and set up rolling updates so updates cause no downtime.

What was built

A thoroughly tested API that serves as the benchmark for the back end, and an Angular front end. In a follow-up project, the team made several smaller internal applications maintainable, with reusable packages.