June 2026 monthly summary highlighting key features delivered, major bugs fixed, and impact across Planning-Inspectorate/back-office and applications-service. Focused on delivering reliable geo-enabled visualization and robust document publishing workflows, with architectural refinements to improve maintainability and future velocity.

May 2026 performance summary for Planning-Inspectorate development teams. This period delivered two core shapefile processing initiatives and strengthened data ingestion workflows across two repositories, contributing to higher throughput, better governance, and stronger security controls around shapefile data. Key work included enabling a new shapefile processing queue in the back-office with updated roles and background job integration, and implementing an end-to-end shapefile ingestion and GeoJSON generation workflow in the back-office API with an Azure Function (Service Bus triggered) and a dedicated processing endpoint. A filename handling refinement was introduced for GeoJSON outputs and later reverted to preserve stable naming. These efforts reduce manual workflow steps, improve data integrity and traceability, and streamline document-management integration for shapefile data.

April 2026 monthly summary for Planning-Inspectorate development teams focusing on business value, platform stability and governance enhancements. Delivered a major platform upgrade and new data-management capabilities across two repositories, driving performance, security, and data integrity. Key outcomes include a Node.js v22 upgrade with Docker, CI pipeline, and ES module support improvements, a comprehensive GIS Shapefiles management flow (folder structure, bulk migration, new API endpoints, batch processing with dry-run, and thorough docs), and enhanced decision-tracking with post-decision court outcome fields in the UI. Implemented a critical redaction status fix post-publication to prevent unauthorized edits, reinforcing document integrity. Overall, these efforts reduce maintenance overhead, accelerate release cycles, and strengthen governance and data quality. Technologies/skills demonstrated include Node.js v22, Docker, Azure Pipelines, Jest ES module configuration, REST/API design, GIS tooling, UI validation, and test automation.

March 2026 — Business value and technical excellence delivered across Planning-Inspectorate services. Key features delivered include a unified Projects maps/search experience with a toggle and URL handling improvements, underpinned by a feature flag for map routes. Infrastructure upgrades modernized the tech stack (Prisma 7.4.2) and npm dependencies, improving performance and reliability. Substantial UX and data quality gains were achieved by increasing file upload limits and applying GOV.UK styling to popup links. In back-office, AI-driven redaction was added to the applications documentation feature, strengthening privacy controls. Across teams, testing and test snapshots were updated to reflect changes, ensuring maintainability and confidence in releases.

February 2026 focused on delivering and maturing the Projects Map capability for Planning-Inspectorate/applications-service, translating business goals into visible project insights while maintaining stability. Key outcomes include a backend geojson endpoint and frontend wiring for a map-based view, a robust UI/UX with OpenLayers-based visualization, a reusable map-filter utility, and session-based filter visibility to improve UX. We fixed critical UX bugs (GDS button double-click, filter panel behavior) and kept up with QA through test and snapshot updates. A controlled revert of the IDAS-40 geojson/API changes was performed to maintain system stability and align with scope constraints for OS Maps integration.

January 2026: Delivered a feature-rich interactive OS Maps-based Project Map with OAuth token management, UK boundary restrictions, and Welsh localization in the applications-service repo, including marker clustering, responsive UI, and comprehensive tests. Implemented API endpoints for map token refresh and project data to streamline map access. In back-office, enabled multi-user roles by relaxing uniqueness constraints for case_manager and environmental_services, with updated unit tests and snapshots. Overall, these changes improve map usability, accessibility, localization, and team collaboration, while strengthening testing and CI signals.