I was very excited just before Christmas when the DWP Secure Communications team headed out into the big world to test our authentication service with real General Practitioners (GPs).
Our team is currently working hard to get our service into Private Beta. At that point the GPs who use our service will benefit from using a fast, easy service to provide patient medical reports and, because DWP will get the information it needs straight away, people will get their payments faster than ever.
Testing the service for real
Our service relies on 3 aspects to complete its goal. The first is an authentication service that can determine that a user is a GP, the second is a web based form where we can capture the information needed and the third is how we push that information into DWP.
"Houston, we have a problem!"
On the day, as GPs started trying to use the service the team were practically hugging the TV, watching the code like something from the Matrix.
As we were poised, all ready to cheer, it became clear that something wasn’t quite right. A small number of users were not getting through. And I don’t mean failing to use the service correctly - they were not even getting to the service. Oh, dear! A small piece of the puzzle wasn’t functioning correctly - something we needed to fix.