Development at a public authority can also be fun

In Germany, authorities are often viewed critically. One often encounters the view that a public authority is rigid, cumbersome, bureaucratic and backward. Excessive bureaucracy is mentioned and a lack of digitalization usually follows on its heels. The Federal Employment Agency is widely known and is therefore probably subject to the same prejudices. Rightly so?

No. It should be obvious to everyone that a public authority with more than 160,000 employees and an IT system house with over 1,000 employees cannot act as quickly as a small start-up from one day to the next.

Working with sensitive customer data also requires a security check and agreement to a confidentiality agreement. Thanks to our many years of involvement in highly regulated and security-critical domains such as healthcare and automotive, we are very familiar with the criticality and relevance of data security and data protection and know exactly what is required to handle sensitive data securely and confidentially.

In addition to the basic requirements for working for the Federal Agency, it is not only technology skills that are important, but also a sound knowledge of German. This is particularly important in order to be able to understand the technical requirements, as the official language is German. The topics that are implemented are close to the everyday lives of the vast majority of people. Be it logging in or registering on the portal to create your own user account, applying for child benefit, support in choosing a career, applying for unemployment benefits and other things.

If these requirements are met, employees can expect a modern working environment. Most of the developers and testers employed work in agile teams in order to be able to provide new features for the customer as quickly as possible. This is all the more important nowadays as it is necessary to react quickly to changing circumstances and changes in legislation.

This is why not only new/current project management models such as Scrum are used here, but also modern tools and technologies. Anyone who assumes that problems are still solved with spreadsheets and fax machines will soon be proven wrong. The development teams work to a large extent independently and decide in teams how they want to solve a task. Many areas of responsibility are represented: Development, quality assurance, DevOps, technical analysis, etc.

First and foremost, the respective projects benefit from our many years of experience in the field of quality assurance. Thanks to the broad spectrum of different projects in many different domains, such as automotive and healthcare, we can draw on a wide range of familiar tools and procedures in order to find the right tooling for the task at hand and implement processes appropriate to the situation. Targeted further education and training courses benefit both employees and projects and help us to provide the right impetus. We see the agile working culture that is practiced at the Federal Agency as an opportunity to expand our

knowledge and our areas of responsibility outside of quality assurance, such as DevOps and development.

Dealing with a large amount of customer data and the requirement to make everything comprehensible for the user places high demands on architecture and design. In addition, there are high demands on the availability of the products and accessibility. Throughout the entire development process, the focus is on the user of the portal. Topics such as accessibility and usability are therefore part of the development team's everyday work.

Due to the interdependence of the individual processes and complex technical requirements, a high level of communication is also required. This has the advantage that you get to know many different colleagues over time and expand your own specialist knowledge.

In conclusion, working at BA's IT system house is exciting, stimulating and varied. As a service provider, it also offers us many opportunities to put our expertise to good use.