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Driving Duck Creek Regression Automation for a Leading Insurer

Synopsis

Duck Creek has become a solution of choice to meet the changing insurance industry demands and customer expectations for a robust insurance platform. The migration to a new technology platform can pose some challenges. The client approached Coforge to reduce the manual effort spent on regression and integration testing the Duck Creek system. A solution to test and compare the forms against pre-set standards was also provided along with seamless integration testing. The solution meant significant savings in terms of efforts for regression testing and also covered for scope where there was no practice of regression testing. This resulted in freed up resources to focus on Duck Creek implementation for upcoming LOBs without having to worry about the quality gates

The Client

The client is a leading regional provider of property and casualty insurance, serving commercial policy holders through a network of independent agents. They offer a full range of commercial insurance products and services, including business owner’s policies, inland marine, umbrella liability, workers compensation, and employment practices liability.

Business Challenge

The client was looking for full automation of regression testing for the Duck Creek policy and billing components, including the downstream integrations. One of their strategic goals was to achieve it before the end of the calendar year, which was just a quarter away. The objective was not only to save on testing for frequent releases but to also touch upon systems and components which were not at all getting regressed. The objectives of this implementation were:

  • Full regression automation of Duck Creek policy and billing systems covering all the LOBs they were already live on
  • Integration testing with downstream systems of reinsurance, claims, OnBase, and data warehouse
  • Testing of Duck Creek policy forms against pre-set standards for templates and contents
  • Creation of a huge set of complex and big policies to test the stability and scalability of the Duck Creek deployment
  • Full automation to achieve efforts and cost savings on the regression testing of the frequent releases.


Our Solution

Coforge proposed automation using the automation tool “Automate Plus.” It is a rich automation tool made on top of the Dotnet framework. It is architected to use the Selenium WebDriver to work with the browsers. This gives the flexibility to work with multiple browsers. The tool has features to record and play the scripts on the Duck Creek platform. The automation is recorded and edited in the “Recorder” component. The scripts are simple readable XML files, whereas the data resides in external Excel documents. The “Player” component of the tool executes the XML scripts, which internally consume the Excel based data files for policy records. On completion of the execution, it automatically sends Excel based reports over email that include the policy number and results. During execution, the tool generates the log files and failure screenshots for further diagnostics. There is also a “PDF Comparer” component which is executed to compare the policy forms against a pre-defined baseline form. This tool does a pixel by pixel comparison of the forms including the data content, form templates, and images/logo on the form.

Two sets of regression buckets were designed for the customer. A mini regression suite that generates approximately 50 policies that run daily during weekdays covering business owners and umbrella policies, and a full regression suite that is executed during weekends or month-ends creating more than 350 policies. Both regression suites were designed to ensure maximum coverage across policy LOBs, billing, integration, and various policy transactions.

On completion of the execution, the system was configured to send automatically generated policy number reports. It also generated the logs and error screenshots on the system for detailed diagnostics in case of failures.

The key highlights of the solution were:

  • Automation based on Coforge’ strategic tool for Duck Creek automation, which is also internally known as Automate Plus
  • Complete automation for full regression creating more than 350 policies spanning multiple LOBs and coverages, which is run over the weekends
  • A mini regression set of policies with 50 policies created in few hours covering multiple LOBs, coverage, and complexity
  • Automation of Duck Creek billing spanning policy creation and corresponding billing transactions
  • Integration testing with customers’ inhouse reinsurance and claims applications
  • Integration testing with OnBase for policy documents
  • Integration testing with Duck Creek shredding and data warehouse
  • Comparison test for Duck Creek policy forms, which is run on the regression generated policies and compared against a pre-set baseline form
  • Reporting of regression results with policy numbers and detailed status on Excel documents automatically shared over configured emails
  • Error diagnostic logs and full screen-shot capture for failures or Duck Creek run time errors
  • Regression is triggered as batches over weekends for full regression and daily for mini set of regression
  • Solution can also be used for policy creation, so that the policies can be used for downstream testing


Delivering More Value

  • More Cost Savings: Replacing manual regression testing with automation resulted in financial savings for the customer.
  • More Time Savings: Automating the process reduced the time for creating one large policy from 35 hours to 65 minutes.
  • More Robustness: The regression suite had the maximum coverage in terms of functionality and ensured enough load on the system parallel with multiple runs. The outcome was a stable and reliable Duck Creek deployment.
  • More Stability: The regression suite helped ensure stability of the Duck Creek deployment by ensuring close to 100% success rate in case of mini-regression and more than 95% success rate for the full regression suite.
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