DOWNLOAD PDF- Achieved 300% return on its investment in test automation.
- Slashed regression testing from 4-5 days to 4 hours.
- Expanded breadth of testing scenarios exponentially, completing 2000 combinations in less than 7 hours vs. a few hundred in 70 hours.
- Uncovered 75 defects per hour per product tested, enabling speedy remediation and contributing to high-quality production experiences.
- Infused development with end-to-end agility, resulting in significantly speeding product and service introductions.
Business Situation
The customer provides insurance and annuity products to United States military service members, and honorably discharged members residing in 11 states. The insurer takes pride in its high retention rate, Fitch A+ rating and total assets in billions of dollars.
Recognizing the Challenges
During its transformation from legacy core systems to the Accenture Life Insurance Platform (ALIP), the customer encountered time-to-market delays due to manual testing processes.
As manual methods restricted testing to a few scenarios and data variations, the resulting inadequacies in breadth of testing negatively impacted production experiences. This included the ALIP platform as well as the insurer’s two coverage application systems: sales application, for internal representatives to complete an insured’s coverage application, and web application, the self-service mechanism for the insurance company’s customers to apply for insurance.
Manual testing insufficiencies also contributed to development costs, due to lags in defect detection, and placed considerable productivity burdens on IT and the business. Simultaneously, the introduction of two new products, Flagship Whole Life and Universal Life, was considerably delayed.
Adopting a Solution
As a mutual insurer dedicated to providing value back to its members, they desired a robust and cost effective solution for automating testing. After considering the options, the life insurance company determined ValueMomentum’s QualityLeap, a QA & Testing service with an emphasis on test automation would help them achieve the multiple technical and business requirements.
Selecting ValueMomentum’s QualityLeap service provided the life insurance company with an innovative industry-centric application-oriented testing automation framework. To address the insurer’s budget constraints, framework included multiple browser-based open-source tools, which reduced investment costs. Some of the tools included Selenium, SOAP UI, Surefire, SVN and TestNG.
Our customer gained industry-leading governance and escalation processes as part of the QualityLeap service framework to ensure ongoing optimization of test automation processes. Additionally, the QualityLeap service provided the insurer with an intuitive dashboard and insurer-centric workflows to ensure test automation is carried out efficiently and effectively to achieve the highest levels of production excellence.
Realizing the Benefits
By adopting the ValueMomentum’s QualityLeap service and associated test automation framework, the life insurance company has fundamentally altered its testing paradigm to make QA a development enabler, rather than the traditional late-stage timeline-extending activity. This shift provided dramatic rewards, mitigating all of the insurer’s challenges.
To start, the time required for completing various tests was significantly reduced. For example, ALIP smoke testing (the initial test to validate a software build’s readiness for comprehensive testing) dropped from 4 hours to 20 minutes, enabling subsequent testing to proceed or, if a build was unstable, immediately returning it to developers for remediation.
Also, breadth of testing is vastly improved. Using legacy methods, the insurer could complete a few hundred scenarios in 70 hours. ValueMomentum’s QualityLeap service enabled testing over 2000 combinations in less than 7 hours. Further, the breadth of testing uncovered over 75 defects per hour per product tested, contributing to faster quality improvements and considerably better production experiences.
Benefits are similarly impressive for regression testing, which assesses the most recent build plus any impacts to all of the previous builds to that point. Full regression testing was reduced from 52 hours, conducted over 4-5 days, to just 4 hours.
Overall, test automation is generating approximately 200 hours of net savings per month. This translates to an approximately 200% return on the investment in the QualityLeap service during the first six months. Within nine months of adoption, ROI jumped to 300%
Today, with its customized test automation solution, the life insurer is conducting advanced application-oriented testing autonomously. What’s more, by leveraging ValueMomentum’s QualityLeap service to transform its QA process into an enabling function, the insurer has infused development with agility end-to-end. This led to introducing innovative new products and services, such as Flagship Whole Life and Universal Life, faster than ever before.