CLIENT OVERVIEW
A well-established insurer with expertise in the specialty insurance business, offering property, casualty, and other specialized insurance products to brokers and small to medium-sized organizations.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The insurer had launched a modernization project, migrating its policy, billing, and claims systems to the Duck Creek cloud platform to accommodate its growing business and improve compatibility with new technologies. For this project, it invested heavily in automated testing with a goal to improve the experience for internal users.
Ensuring as defect-free a system as possible for users allows the insurer to deliver results and enhancements to the system with increased agility and efficiency. This automation-first approach enhances the speed-to-market of the company’s products. Leveraging a C# framework, the insurer’s goal for the project was to have automatic regression testing for the key pieces of functionality that cover the entire release lifecycle.
Initially, the insurer enlisted a third-party QA partner to manage end-toend quality engineering, including performance, UAT, and support. After the project started, however, it became clear that it needed a vendor with more technology and platform expertise to drive down the cost of testing and increase the overall transparency of the project.
After considering various vendor partners, it selected ValueMomentum’s QA & Testing team due to VM’s domain expertise and a commitment to continuous improvement that would help advance its end-to-end legacy modernization.
SOLUTION OFFERED
The successful rollout of the upgrade project relied upon the creation and implementation of internal tools and external ratings tools, as well as changes to optimize existing processes. Faulty automation scripts were identified and repaired, performance testing was re-established, and test metrics were standardized.
The end-to-end project was completed in just 2 sprints over 6 weeks, including smoke tests, functional testing, business process testing, automation testing, regression testing, performance testing, defining tools and assets, creating roadmaps, implementation, and maintenance. The project team from VM consisted of both onsite and offshore staff, including a project manager, test leads, and testers, working closely with the insurer’s DevSecOps team and program managers.
A Poker Agile estimation approach was used to implement various standard processes to the Azure DevOps workflow management tool, e.g., tasks now indicate the exact time they took to complete, and any bugs encountered in those tasks are linked within the system. This approach standardized the process of estimating the effort required to complete a given task or project.
A Shift-Left approach was implemented to identify more defects in the development stage. With a 2 to 3 sprint backlog of Product Backlog Items (PBIs) completed and reviewed, the testing team developed test strips and allocated their strips for the developers building out the new functionality to run in development and catch defects in lower environments.
“With stabilized and automated test cases, the company achieved 90% productive and workable test cases, and regression test automation reduced manual test efforts by 30%.”
VALUE DELIVERED
Collaborating with ValueMomentum’s QA & Testing team, the insurer laid the groundwork for QE success for the ongoing modernization initiative. With current manual regression test cases restored to fill test coverage gaps, the insurer experienced fewer UAT defects. It also was able to leverage data across multiple downstream applications and reduced test case design efforts.
Newly integrated smoke test automation with a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline accelerated speed-to-market, and a new centralized knowledge management repository quickened resource assimilation of various system flows. With stabilized and automated test cases, the company achieved 90% productive and workable test cases, and regression test automation reduced manual test efforts by 30%.
