MAXIMUS chooses requirements-driven testing from Micro Focus to tame complex technology and process modernization for critical government data processing challenges.
"An integrated solution has been core to our modernization efforts by allowing us to ensure requirements are fully captured and fully tested and, post modernization, our production support information is always current so we can easily assess the impact of ongoing change."
JOEL LEVINSON
CIO
MAXIMUS Canada
Government
United States
For over three decades, MAXIMUS has partnered with governments around the world to provide health and human service program management to a diverse array of communities. MAXIMUS’s mission of Helping Government Serve the People has made the company a leader in working with government agencies to develop cost-effective health and human service programs tailored to their communities’ unique needs and at the same time offering the ability to implement programs rapidly with scalable operations and automated systems.
With global operations across North America, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel, MAXIMUS leverages extensive experience and commitment to provide the highest quality services and solutions. Over 6,500 employees are dedicated to providing innovative programs that improve quality of life around the globe.
MAXIMUS operations span a wide range of activities—from leading administration of Medicaid and CHIP services in the U.S and providing workforce-centered services in the U.S, Australia, U.K and Israel, to pioneering welfare reform and placing approximately 500,000 individuals in unsubsidized employment. MAXIMUS is also the manager for more than 13 million ticket-holders and more than 1,300 employment network agencies and the number one rated for-profit provider under the Australian Job Services star rating program.
Operating on this scale and with core government infrastructures involves substantial challenges. In order to provide the significant support required, MAXIMUS turned to a requirements driven testing approach based on Micro Focus software delivery solutions.
Government organizations often have a complex mix of enterprise, legacy, and modern distributed and SOA-based applications they struggle to move forward. Applications in use have seen documentation atrophy over time and the experts that once knew the ‘ins and outs’ of the applications are no longer on hand. To provide its clients with the innovative solutions required to deliver world-class services, MAXIMUS had to find ways to embrace this complexity and the high volume of change to fulfill its mission and become an enabler of agility in government IT.
In the face of these challenges, MAXIMUS operates in highly regulated environments, making it imperative to be able to trace and track every change they make to software, from the requirements that are defined through to the testing that validated it, in order to produce robust audit histories.
In summary, MAXIMUS needed a solution to automate the processing of high volumes of change and easily keep track of the relationships between change requests, requirements, tests, and defects. As the scale of the challenges has grown along with the success of the business, MAXIMUS recognized that some of the manual methods it had been using, such as tracking change via email, were no longer adequate.
The company needed to automate its software development life cycle to continue to deliver systems with the rigor demanded by customers. MAXIMUS sought a delivery process where quality was constantly measured in accordance with client needs, so it could remediate problems, maintain the high quality and deliver systems that enable governments to work at maximum efficiency.
In Canada, MAXIMUS operates the Health Insurance BC program on behalf of the British Columbia Provincial government. This program involves the enrolment and account management of around 4.5M citizens, the processing of approximately $125M in fees for service medical claims each year, and the operation of the Provincial Drug information system serving over 850 community and hospital pharmacies province wide.
Errors that occur in large-scale data processing environments, such as in Health Insurance BC, can have huge downstream implications. For example, prior to filling a prescription, BC pharmacists perform a real-time drug utilization review to prevent adverse drug interactions with other medications on the patient’s drug history and ensure the prescription is within normal dosage parameters for the given drug. These results have to be delivered correctly and immediately while patients are standing at the pharmacy counter. Errors in these results could cost more than money, and risks of this scale require constant mitigation and attention to quality.
With integrated capabilities for Requirements Management, Change Management and a complete solution for testing, MAXIMUS identified the one software delivery solution that could help them become a leader: Micro Focus.
The flexibility and openness of Micro Focus products enabled MAXIMUS to adapt the solution to their own standardized requirements driven testing methods. Based on a very rich requirements model that flows downstream into test plans and test cases, MAXIMUS’s requirements-driven testing replaced a manually intensive tracking and tracing of their life cycle with a highly automated system that could process a vast amount of change very efficiently. Today, through the use of Micro Focus Caliber, Micro Focus Silk and Micro Focus StarTeam®, these changes are automatically tracked and traced as new systems are defined, built out and validated.
All of this tracking and tracing capability has led to one very important benefit—manageability. The Micro Focus products have enabled MAXIMUS to manage quality with a goal-based approach to testing that ensures delivery of systems within high-complexity and stringent quality standards.
As Janine Roy, Test Manager, says, “Our testing process is now very deterministic. We understand everything that needs to be tested as it relates to requirements and have a real-time understanding of where we are at with achieving testing goals and the quality of the product we produce.
This solution has also been key in enabling MAXIMUS to support its infrastructure modernization efforts. At the start of modernization projects, customers must be efficiently onboarded. To achieve this goal, MAXIMUS uses the open interfaces of Micro Focus solutions to enable staff to efficiently capture requirements for existing systems so that transformation and change can begin. After projects have delivered a complete set of requirements definitions, the test plans and the complete state of the system are used to springboard the next transformation by assessing impact and reusing requirements and test assets, saving precious dollars for MAXIMUS and its clients.
MAXIMUS Canada CIO, Joel Levinson, considers that, “An integrated solution has been core to our modernization efforts by allowing us to ensure requirements are fully captured and fully tested and, post modernization, our production support information is always current so we can easily assess the impact of ongoing change. We depend on Micro Focus solutions to enable this capability.”
Adopting a requirements-driven testing approach and embedding quality Micro Focus software products across its development lifecycle has returned significant benefits for MAXIMUS, including a reduction in rework and cycle time, a scalable system for managing change on large government systems, greater customer confidence and assurance that requirements (in mission- and life-critical health care/pharmaceutical applications environment) are fully tested. MAXIMUS sees its business-process optimization and technology-modernization services as core to the success of its clients, and Micro Focus software-delivery solutions are embedded in that service offering.