An insurance provider reduced testing time by 94 percent

This large, US-based insurance company provides workers’ compensation insurance to organizations in the United States.

Labor-intensive and expensive manual-testing process

For legislative and business reasons, insurance companies go through a process called “rate filing.” This involves adjusting rates and classification codes in a quote engine based on environmental factors such as increased risk, competitive pricing and class-code depreciation as set by the Department of Insurance. The more rapidly an organization completes its rate filing, the more quickly it can respond to market forces and develop new products, making it more competitive.

To remain competitive, the organization needed the flexibility to change its quote engine and customer service delivery more frequently and without the massive financial burden associated with manual testing.

The insurance provider was rate filing just twice a year because the testing process was so labor intensive and expensive. More than half of the development team members were dedicated to manually testing quote engine components. Business users also had to carry out performance testing and user acceptance testing during the development cycle. It took approximately eight weeks to carry out the development and testing required before changes to the quote engine could go live. It was calculated that manual testing represented 67 percent of the total time and resources required when rate filing. This represented more than USD500,000 each time, a cost composed of external professional services and internal resources.

The company needed to find a way to reduce costs and expedite the rate filing process.

A single platform for developers and testers

The insurance provider engaged IBM for its IBM® Rational® Test Workbench software, which delivered a single platform for developers and testers. This allowed them to assure consistent deployment of Web Services Description Languages (WSDLs), thus eliminating duplication and errors caused by multiple and incorrect versions while accelerating deployment times and improving quality of deliverables.

In addition, the platform offered a tool for developers to create validation tests, which were turned into unit, integration and regression tests by the quality-assurance team. Business users were able to seamlessly expand unit tests with this new tool.

Rational Test Workbench software helped enable daily validation of the environment. Once developed, test scripts were stored in Rational Test Workbench software, which allowed the team to quickly rerun and report results. Daily validation was necessary to ensure that daily deployments did not affect the quote engine calculations. In addition to validation, Rational Test Workbench software helped the team regression test before and after each change.

The time required for testing dramatically decreased. Users no longer needed to submit individual claims and applications to simulate activity, because the IBM team developed an intersection between the user-interface automation component and Rational Test Workbench software to provide users with a graphical user interface. This enabled them to execute batch tests via Rational Test Workbench software. Not only was this significantly faster, but the software also provided the users with meaningful, easy-to-use results, which were not available when testing manually.

Faster testing at a lower cost

As a result of IBM Rational Test Workbench software, the client achieved numerous benefits that directly reduced the overall time and costs associated with rate filing and the amount of time necessary to simulate transactions dropped by 95 percent, to just two hours.

Team members can rerun established tests at the click of a button. The new platform has been unified so that quality-assurance (QA) employees and developers can standardize and share technical testing assets and test data, plus communication was improved between testers and developers. Customers and stakeholders were enabled to be more hands-on with testing and therefore achieved earlier acceptance of deliverables.

Rational Test Workbench software reduced the overall time required to rerun QA testing by 90 percent. This represents a savings of 1,000 hours in user testing alone. In addition, because automated tests developed in the user-interface automation component could run automatically, or Rational Test Workbench software could launch them manually, the testing and validation time for the online fields dropped by 75 percent to four hours.

Rational Test Workbench software reduced the overall time required for user testing by 50 percent. In particular, 469 hours were saved in validating the quote engine. Overall, this represented savings of USD76,500 on user testing alone. These savings are expected to increase over time because Rational Test Workbench software helps enable the team to rerun tests with the click of a button, a process that would have taken an experienced businessperson ten minutes for each test.

Rational Test Workbench software embedded live data into tests, so testers needed little or no explanation to execute individual or batch tests. Prior to the IBM solution, analysis showed that 90 percent of the time was spent analyzing failures and just 10 percent correcting them.

For more information

To learn more about IBM Rational software, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/rational or ibm.com/software/rational/offerings/quality

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