Monitoring for form-filling automation

When the Home Office updates its Visa Application Forms (VAFs), the layout and validation rules can change without notice. We plan for this: AORA monitors our automations daily, investigates issues immediately, and restores service quickly to minimise disruption for your team.

This risk mainly applies to the 19 VAF automations we currently support (the Sponsorship Management System interface rarely changes). Below is how we detect form changes early and what we do if an update affects an automation.

How we manage Home Office form updates

Every day at 1:00 am (UK time), an automated test runs across our supported automations and sends the results to a monitored mailbox. This gives us early warning if a Home Office change has affected a VAF so that we can start remediation work straight away. We also maintain out-of-hours development cover to begin fixes overnight where needed.

If an automation cannot be restored immediately, we temporarily disable it and clearly label it as Down for maintenance. This prevents users from encountering avoidable errors while we implement the fix.

Six of the 19 VAF automations run on the government's UKVI platform and require a one-time password (OTP), which means they cannot be fully tested end-to-end overnight. In practice, Home Office changes are usually applied across both UKVI and non-UKVI versions of a form, so our overnight testing of the other 13 VAF automations still provides early warning of most updates.

More substantial Home Office changes are less common, but when they happen, they can require additional data or a revised question flow. In these cases, we prioritise a rapid update to keep the automation running to completion, then follow up by updating the relevant questionnaires so the correct data is captured going forward (typically within around a day).