Testing a complex, high-volume service to help HM Passport Office cut delays, boost reliability, and serve millions of citizens faster.
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HM Passport Office was modernising through a complex, end-to-end digital transformation. It needed to be QA'd as a whole. We helped deliver a faster, more resilient service by testing every part of the staff journey, ensuring high performance, robust security, and complete accessibility.
Cast your mind back to the summer of 2022. Covid lockdowns had finally become a thing of the past. Worldwide travel restrictions were being eased on the back of a successful vaccination drive, while airlines and airports were ramping up their services. It meant that stir-crazy Brits could finally jet off to sunny paradises. And they were desperate to do so.
But to travel abroad, you need a valid passport. Between January and September that year, HM Passport Office (HMPO) received 7.2 million new applications. While this was well below the 9.5 million applications HMPO had planned to cater for, the applications came in faster and earlier than forecast, creating pressure on post-covid systems that were not yet fully scaled.
In the busiest week alone, starting 16 May 2022, 340,000 new applications landed on HMPO’s desks, more than double the regular weekly volume. It meant that a backlog quickly built up. And by June, over half a million people waited longer than 10 weeks for their passports. It left hundreds of thousands of citizens facing severely disrupted travel plans and in some cases, facing difficulty in proving their identity for downstream services domestically.
And while the public outcry which ensued, fuelled by unrelenting reporting by the media, became a large embarrassment for HMPO, it quickly grew into a severe political crisis too.
Fast forward to today, and in a stark improvement credited to world class digital systems, HMPO can turn around many applications in as little as five days. This dramatic delivery transformation did not happen overnight. It was achieved through a relentless focus on end to end testing and quality assurance for a high volume digital public service.
Scrumconnect is recognised for playing its part in helping HMPO to reinvent this process. By rigorously testing the full staff-facing journey, Scrumconnect and HMPO’s teams ensured the new platform was robust, secure, accessible and compliant. The testing covered everything from migrating legacy back-office systems to validating the new ingestion pipeline, which processes data from multiple sources and supports staff-facing interfaces and admin reporting. The system was built to meet strict auditing and compliance standards tied to HMPO’s core business processes. This made the testing approach itself a model for quality assurance in high-volume, operationally critical government systems.
We tested the full staff-facing journey behind the new passport platform, making sure it was resilient, secure, and accessible from day one.
We built test environments that mirrored live conditions and validated how staff uploaded, processed, and reported on high volumes of data.
Using behaviour-driven development and CI pipelines, we caught issues early and ensured every deployment worked end-to-end.
We tested screen readers, keyboard navigation and device compatibility to meet WCAG 2.2 AA and GDS accessibility standards.
We ran large-scale load tests to simulate seasonal demand and confirmed the platform could scale to meet peak traffic without failure.
We combined functional QA with penetration testing, code scanning and audit trails to protect sensitive data and meet Home Office security requirements.
We adopted a shift-left mindset, working alongside developers to test features early and often—speeding up delivery without sacrificing stability.
HM Passport Office now turns applications round in days, not weeks, handles record demand and remains accessible to every citizen on any device.
Our end-to-end testing approach helped HMPO streamline internal workflows, cut manual effort, and dramatically reduce processing times—down from over 10 weeks at peak to just a few days for many applications.
Robust performance testing proved the platform could handle seven times normal load, allowing HMPO to plan confidently for seasonal surges and unexpected spikes in application volumes.
By embedding accessibility testing throughout delivery, we ensured the service met all legal standards and could be used reliably by people with assistive tech, low digital confidence or slower internet connections.
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