The Dutch Tax Office is one of the early adopters of the Normalized Systems theory. They have been building NS-applications for over 10 years and, fun fact, the first NS-application that has been deployed in production at the Dutch Tax Office celebrated its tenth birthday last month (January).

Because of the general structure of all NS-applications, a team of our engineers can monitor over 25 applications with a custom developed tool which is called, the NS-portal. With this implementation, we daily check the quality of our code, the current expander-version of every application in production and in development as well as a long list of required demands. 

For example: no unnecessary overlays, no binary files in the repository, no vulnerabilities, warnings on deprecated code or up-to-date dependencies. If configured, all dependencies are updated automatically, but for some projects, developers choose to do it manually due to certain risks. 

The “health” of each application is daily updated and posted in a dashboard on an internal URL. Not only developers, but also product owners, managers, or application users can check the current state of their application. This way, we have the tools for necessary updates, and we raise awareness of the importance of support, which should be a priority in every organization, and which tends to be overlooked.

The idea of the ‘NS portal’ has plenty of complementary ideas with the ‘NS Prime radiant’ developed in NSX Niel. Currently, there are efforts to merge the idea’s of the ‘NS Prime radiant’ and ‘NS portal’ so both the Dutch tax office and NSX can enjoy each other’s efforts and other hubs can join.