Client Overview

The client provides premium short-term and life insurance as well as investment products to a diverse customer base, including individual consumers, commercial entities and corporate clients. The Group has over 6 million customers in 19 countries on four continents and employs more than 4 000 people worldwide.

"We work closely with domain experts like Inspired Testing to maintain a rigorous testing process for all our software systems prior to and during implementation."
- IT Manager, Direct and partner operation in South Africa.

The company is committed to forming long-term partnerships with its corporate customers in a way that allows these customers to share in the benefits of improved group risk management. One of the methodologies utilized to achieve this goal is regular upgrades of the company’s core systems, which facilitate the improvement of the Group's internal and customer-facing services and provides customers with peace of mind and confidence in the continuation of high service levels.

Problem statement

Ahead of a major upgrade to the latest version of its core line of business systems, the Inspired Testing Quality Assurance team was tasked to determine the performance impact of the upgrade on the company’s call centres, claims agents, branch network and customers. Inspired Testing was also tasked with troubleshooting performance issues on the company’s physical server infrastructure and determining the long-term performance and stability benefits of a virtual environment. In addition, the scope of the project aimed at reducing the time spent on software regression testing across multiple insurance policy capturing systems, which run an array of different products, without incurring downtime and subsequent loss of performance or customer service levels, as well as allowing the company to maintain statutory and industry compliance.

Solution

Inspired Testing provided an Automation Testing Solution that significantly cut the time spent on regression testing, using its in-house Automation Testing framework. The project utilized Agile, using scrum with weekly sprints. Inspired Testing’s Selenium-based UTA-H Test Automation framework was a perfect fit for testing web applications.

After improvement

• Inspired Testing was able to rapidly develop performance testing scripts to accurately simulate user and website behavior, modelled directly from the company’s production environment.
• A total of 145 test scenarios were executed.
• Automation Test Execution = 6.96 hours versus Manual Test Execution = 34.83 hours. Automation Execution achieved a result of 5 x faster execution cycle.

Benefit to the client after implementation

• Avoidance of significant downtime, in alignment with the company’s objectives.
• Automation Regression Testing gave the client peace of mind to pursue an ambitious upgrade and system re-engineering process, designed to significantly raise an already-high service bar for the call centre agents and customers.
• Post-project measurements of business continuity and revenue, the benefit to the company’s clients and perception of their brand yielded highly positive results, which were achieved by maintaining exceptional service levels through system availability and responsiveness.

The client has subsequently engaged with Inspired Testing for additional cycles of performance testing for major system upgrades in the future. In addition, the Inspired Testing team was able to show the performance benefits of virtualizing the production environment, giving the client a predictable and measurable upgrade path for future business services.