Top P&C insurance company on pace to achieve $25 million in savings for multi-year testing modernization project
Top P&C insurance company on pace to achieve $25 million in savings for multi-year testing modernization project
This U.S.-based property and casualty insurance company is one of the nation’s top insurers with over $18 billion in direct written premiums. The company secured a global, enterprise-wide Hexawise license in 2018. More than 800 resources at the firm have signed up to use Hexawise since then.
Problem
Testing was creating a bottleneck for this insurer - the organization experienced slow time-to-market and higher-than-average testing costs within its Agile software development model. Stakeholders wanted to address this head-on by significantly reducing testing costs without sacrificing end-user quality for their customers. The enterprise was experiencing high costs for several reasons: too much spending on its testing workforce, too many tests within its suites, and premature test automation capabilities that were extremely difficult and costly to maintain. The original goal was to cut overall costs by 20%.
Challenges
Solution
The P&C insurer worked with its testing services partner provider to transform its Agile testing capability into a Quality Engineering model, with test optimization as one of its key pillars. Leadership realized that they would need to create a new role and replace its previous, siloed testing positions - one that required resources to do more for testing including, but not limited to, developing more intelligent test design and test automation skills.
Test optimization was to be addressed first in the transformation, since it was determined that it would provide the nearest term “wins”. Hexawise was chosen as the solution to reach that goal. The company’s teams initially optimized test suites with Hexawise for their most-used customer-facing applications. Significantly more thorough coverage was achieved in these test sets by using Hexawise to systematically eliminate critical gaps in testing coverage and repeated scenarios that were leading to too many costly tests as a result of previous, traditional methods used for test case creation.
Hexawise use was mandated whenever there was a need to optimize existing tests or generate optimized tests for new projects, thus leading to guaranteed greater value achieved in test planning, execution, and automation. The company developed groups of “Quality Engineering Coaches” who were selected to quickly become internal Hexawise experts, in order to operationalize the use of Hexawise across the testing organization and accelerate company-wide adoption of its optimized approaches to test design.
Teams then turned to Tricentis Tosca’s codeless test automation capabilities for execution of the optimized Hexawise tests. With the new Quality Engineering roles, resources could use Tosca to run their optimized Hexawise tests without any coding required in order to do more with less. Hexawise built an integration for Tosca to allow users to seamlessly transition objectively-better, model-based test sets from Hexawise into Tosca’s test automation capabilities (which is now widely available to all Hexawise client companies). By building these solutions, the testing organization would realize massive savings in the near and long terms.
Outcomes
Due to this multi-year, quality engineering-focused transformation, the P&C insurance company is on pace to realize approximately $25 million in savings. Leadership originally projected to achieve 20% in overall savings, but that has significantly increased since the onset of the transformation. Hexawise use has led to significant value achieved in higher testing coverage, fewer tests, and collaboration and communication across business and technical teams.
For example, for a highly-visible, auto-insurance ratings engine application, Hexawise tests achieved almost double the amount of testing coverage (97% coverage) in half as many tests, as seen in this coverage comparison (using Hexawise’s detailed coverage reports that are automatically provided):
In addition, value is now realized from Hexawise use in every step of the Quality Engineering lifecycle. Not only are teams achieving significantly higher testing coverage and doing so in fewer tests, but they are also using Hexawise to improve their collaboration and communication about testing scopes and requirements across teams. Quality Engineers use Hexawise with business analysts, managers, and developers to collaboratively create both clear and complete requirements, and a shared view of testing scope and strategy:
Overall, the bank realized a greater than 25% reduction in testing costs - there were fewer scripts to run and maintain, and the test suite now reached 100% coverage of all critical system interactions. The bank’s stakeholders had significantly higher confidence in its test automation efforts and still uses Hexawise to generate new sets of optimized tests alongside its test automation frameworks throughout the entire organization.
Across the organization, Hexawise is currently used for...
- Requirements definition
- Functional testing
- User acceptance testing
- Systems integration testing
- Non-functional testing
- Regression testing
- Agile sprints
- Test automation efforts, and many other projects
Along with generating this increased value with Hexawise, since procuring Hexawise in 2018, more than 6,600 optimized Hexawise test plans have been created with more than 34,000 computations requested inside those plans. More than 200 Quality Engineers have also become Certified Hexawise Test Design Professionals.
