Business assurance testing for a global provider of risk management products & services in US

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Overview

Our customer is one of the largest global providers of Risk management products and services and is listed on the Fortune 500 providing financial protection to more than 200 million people worldwide.

Business objectives of the customer and business needs of the customer address

The key business objectives of our customer:

Expand Product Offerings to build a new Client base.
Developing Next-Gen solutions to gain technological edge over competitors.
Strengthen core capabilities to enhance the user experience, implementing Digital and Mobile innovations.
Improve process efficiencies, both internal and client-facing (call-centers) reducing Operational costs to invest in growth opportunities.

The business needs arising out of the above objectives include efficient, reliable and innovative service from a trusted partner and we provided the same through SLA based end-to-end Quality Assurance service and brought in automation at scale to reduce the cost of quality.

Roles and team structure utilized

We are Customer’s Preferred Quality Partner for all testing services across different Lines of Businesses (Vehicle, Mobile Devices, Home Appliances & Electronics, Mobile, Renter’s Insurance, Flood Insurance, Preneed) and Business Processes (Policy Enrolment, Policy Services, Billing, Claims and Communications). We have set up a tiered governance and team structure to perform our services.

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Functional and technical expertise provided

We provide functional and technical expertise to the Lines of Businesses and Business Processes shown below:

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Technology stack includes:

Azure Dev Ops, Application Insights, App Service, Event Grid/Hub, Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus, Data Bricks, Lake and Factory, Cosmos DB
.Net Stack, SonarQube, ReSharper, Groovy, Xslts, MVC 4.0, Ajax, Java Script, Service Fabric
Java, Node JS, BOOTSTRAP
OKTA SSO
Soap UI, Postman
Selenium with Specflow, Coded UI
UC4 Automic Batch Job Scheduler
SSIS, Mulesoft, Microservices
Kibana, Dyna Trace
SQL Server, Oracle, DB2
Robotics Process Automation (RPA)

Description of functional solution

We provide QA workforce who are already well versed in the Insurance domain, required tools & technologies, testing processes & methodologies and possess good communication and presentation skills for effective ownership of deliverables for Customers and their Customers. Our comprehensive Engagement Test Strategy is based on the following principles to deliver high quality with speed:

Test Early, Test Fast & Fail Fast: Our Shift-Left approach to identify Bugs/Issues in the early stages of the development cycle and in the lowest possible environment helps to reduce the cost of fixing and allows minimizing the creation of Technical Debt.

Maximize Automation: Increased both In-Sprint and Regression Coverage and provided an exhaustive suite of multi-purpose automation scripts.

Risk-Based Testing: Prioritized features/bugs planned for each release in order to optimize testing efforts and achieving maximum business value.

Real-time Dashboards & Metrics: Created transparency between Stakeholders and Team to track Test Progress as well as Release progress helping to plan any mitigation plan proactively.

Quality Assurance: Engaged in all phases of SDLC for any methodology implemented starting from Initiation to Closure/Maintenance.

Quality Control: Implemented thresholds defining Entry & Exit criteria for builds, releases, and stories(Definition of Done) to ensure quality with minimal rework.

Description of technical and architectural system

All QA activities are managed in Microsoft Azure DevOps (ADO) tool for both Agile-Scrum and Planned Release based deliverables. The testing team is aligned with Dev & Operations teams to ensure seamless CI/ CD within ADO by implementing Test Management, Bug Management, Traceability Matrix, Repository Management for Test Artifacts and Automation scripts, real-time Dashboards & Reports. In addition to ADO, best industry tools were used for Functional Automation – Selenium in Visual Studio with Specflow for BDD, Web Services Testing using SoapUI & Postman.

Description of test automation solution

Client challenges & Our Solution

Test Automation Workflow:

Feature files contain business scenarios
Steps file executes scenarios step by step
Test journeys orchestrates test flow across business flows
Business Façade encapsulates business flows from feature files.
Business modules encapsulate application implementation of business flows
Page objects encapsulate page level implementation
DTOs (Data Transfer Objects) are used for injecting input parameters for testing
Test Assertions yield results of running feature test cases

Benefits Achieved

Agility: Up to 25% reduction in testing cycle time
Acceleration: In-sprint test automation increased by 30%
Assurance: > 90% automation regression test coverage
Reusability: increased by > 40%

Description of your company’s role in the engagement

Engage in requirement elicitation with Business and Stakeholders to bring desired Customer Experience.
Responsible for quality of Client product offerings by owning all Testing activities from Initiation to Delivery.
Innovate by creating Reusable automation framework delivering more than 90% Regression coverage increasing reusability of components by more than 40%.
Contribute to standardizing and implementing industry best practices in agile delivery model including DevOps (CI\CD).

Description of the methodologies used

Testing teams supported varying Software Development Methodologies like Agile-Scrum, Waterfall, Iterative, V-Model, etc. throughout the engagement and always exceeded the expectations to become Preferred Quality Partner.

Implemented following test approaches for functional and non-functional testing needs. Customer Centric Testing: to keep User’s interactions in focus improving their experience and reducing Production issues after every release.

Risk-Based Testing: to prioritize features/bugs planned for each release in order to optimize testing efforts and achieving maximum Business value.
Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) of Automation scripts: to bridge understanding gaps between Business and Technical teams building confidence in automation supported CI/CD.
Shift-Left: to detect, fix and retest Bugs in the lowest environment possible deriving reduced cost of quality and minimising technical debt.

Description of the activities carried out

We are providing both Agile CI/CD and managed testing services for different business LOBs & processes.

Keeping quality in mind, we collaborate with Business, Internal/External Stakeholders, Development teams (Client/Third Party), Operations and Release Management teams.

We provide operational flexibility & agility to cater for any surge in testing demand and business needs by implementing T-Shaped model, up-to-date Knowledge repository and effective usage of Onshore – Offshore delivery model with overlap.

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Description of mitigations implemented to avoid risk or overcome challenges

Following mitigation strategy is implemented to avoid Known/Unknown Risks and overcome challenges proactively to ensure reliable, reusable, robust and scalable development & delivery model that is easier to maintain and support.

Established Business Continuity Plan (BCP) with a fully functional BCP location to resume operation within hours of any disaster.
Effective knowledge management with a well-managed document repository with quick turnaround time in upskilling/cross-skilling workforce.
T-Shaped Model based QA workforce pool with an understanding of minimum 3 applications to support workload spikes in any of the supported area.
Reusable automation framework across multiple applications.
Predictive Outcome Value Analysis by implementing Real-Time Analytics Dashboards and metrics meeting industry standards to monitor the progress, anticipate any Delivery Risk/Challenge and putting up a Risk avoidance plan.