Roadmap

At a glance

How we prioritize our work

Our vision is to make it easier for federal public servants to publish online, secure, accessible, and bilingual forms so that members of the public can get access to benefits and services.

GC Forms is built and developed in an agile and iterative way. The goal of this roadmap is to let you know what’s already on our radar and provide an estimate of when we’ll be working on it.

We re-evaluate our prioritization after each major feature release and periodically throughout the year. We do this to ensure we can respond to emerging trends, issues, or needs from clients.

For this roadmap we’ll use T-shirt sizes. The team works in three-week sprints. Each T-shirt size corresponds with the estimated complexity of a task:

Small [S] : About a sprint
Medium [M] : 1 to 2 sprints
Large [L] : 2+ to 4 sprints
Extra large [XL] : 4+ sprints

The more complex the task, the less accurate our time estimations will be. That’s just the nature of complex systems and the planning fallacy.

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Now

What we’re currently focused on:

• Improve address validation with Canada Post’s AddressComplete [L]
• Conduct research on how to support publishing workflows for program teams [L]
• Enhance multi-factor authentication options and strengthen security of the GC Forms application with migration to a new identity provider for form builders [XL]

Next

What we’ll look into later this fiscal year:

• Move from alpha domain to Canada.ca [M]
• Increase the number of responses form administrators can download at one time, helping forms receiving high-volumes by offering the option to get more than 150 responses at a time [L]
• Allow file uploads to be added in all forms (in the interface as well, not just when retrieving responses with developer capacity to set up a API integration) [XL]
• Improve enforcement of data retention standards [L]

Later

Opportunities on the radar to explore:

• Managing team member permissions on a form [XL]
• Facilitate the potential integration of response files with MS365 or SharePoint instances in order to incorporate form submission data into existing workflows [XL]
• Improving assurance with support for e-signatures in forms [XL]
• Integrating simple tables into forms [L]
• Supporting languages other than French and English [XL]
• Pre-filling known form data for end users [XL]

Done

Highlights of work completed since 2024:

• Support editing live forms to make changes once published and control versions [XL]
• Provide clients with a log of recent activities and events on a form [M]
• Allow multiple people to share a draft form in GC Forms with sequential editing [M]
• Renew our Authority to Operate [XL]
• Add advanced data validation options for form questions [L]
• Improve the experience of adding hundreds of options to a dropdown list [M]
• Accessibility audit by a third-party [M]
• Data retrieval API: Set unique question IDs or tag questions with a label [M]
• Evaluate impact of sending response data via email, including retiring the option [L]
• Response data API meets the PBMM security profile [XL]
• Get form responses via an API for Protected A forms [XL]
• Provide form fillers with a copy of their response [L]
• Provide form fillers the ability to save their progress [XL]
• Improve service alarms and monitoring [M]
• Integrate the Government of Canada’s Design System V1 [M]
• Penetration testing and service reliability improvements [L]
• Pilot access to form responses via an API [XL]
• Custom text on closed forms to help set expectations with form fillers [M]
• Allow form fillers to add multiple answers to a set of questions [L]
• Add a team member to your form to help manage responses without support [L]
• Provide additional date formats for forms [S]
• Improve on-call response capabilities [L]
• Add pages, conditional logic, branching, and a review page [XL]
• Show/hide logic for form questions for radio buttons and dropdowns [M]
• Improve typography, usability issues, error messages [M]
• Provide 24/7 support for severity 1 issues [L]
• Provide additional formats for form responses [L]

Not implementing

Deprioritized for reasons such as focus, security, accessibility, feasibility, etc.:

• Integrating a form on another website
  • To prevent cross-site scripting attacks and maintain PBMM Authority to operate, GC Forms will not be supporting integrations of forms on a third-party webpage.
• Likert scales
  • To ensure forms remain responsive to different screen sizes and accessible via smaller mobile devices, GC Forms will not be implementing Likert scales.
• Custom domains
  • To ensure consistency and that all forms created using GC Forms are hosted on a ‘canada.ca’ domain.

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