Headquartered in Buffalo, New York, Independent Health is a not-for-profit health plan that continually aims to provide innovative healthrelated products and services, which enable affordable access to quality healthcare.
Independent Health was formed in 1980 and now has nearly 400,000 members and over 1,000 associates. It serves eight counties in Western New York and its award-winning customer service, dedication to quality healthcare and unmatched relationships with physicians and providers has allowed it to be consistently recognized as one of the highest-ranked health insurance plans in the nation.
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This attention to quality is mirrored by the work of its test team mentored by Chris Trimper, the test automation chief architect responsible for automation tool suites and functional testing.
“We are committed to providing value and our impact on the company is that our testing ensures that everyone gets a really great user experience, whether they are a member, a provider or a hospital worker,” says Trimper. “Our test coverage is so large that in any week we could be running between 500 to 1,000 tests and if they were done manually it would add up to a lot of work. For some of the products that we have to test, it would take us several days to do a full regression cycle manually. That takes testers away from other activities that they should be doing like projects on new products or good exploratory and growth tests.”
The team needed tools that would save time and enable them to become more effective testers. The solution not only had to help them complete the rigorous testing but also introduce properly managed automation.
Independent Health chose to combine Micro Focus Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with Micro Focus UFT One on premise. ALM is designed to enable teams of all sizes to deliver high quality apps with greater speed and agility. UFT One is an automated functional testing tool that uses automated tests to identify bugs
“When we first started looking at ALM and UFT One we were just looking to save testing time,” says Trimper. “However, as time has gone on, we’re now using them to develop full blown regression suites for our products.”
The team harnesses the power of ALM.NET for all its manual test cases and full regression sets. All test executions go into ALM to enable cohesive and standardized recording and all automated tests tie into it. Load testing software and Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional is also used to conduct frequent performance testing.
“We carry out a daily test run just to have a full understanding of the health of the system. We have trending reports that we can leverage with that and we have also turned some of those into performance monitors and production with AppPulse active,” says Trimper.
Using ALM and UFT One enables the automation and manual test teams to manage both kinds of testing more efficiently. Regression testing on some of the larger test projects are now 70% automated which knocks off two thirds of the testing that needs to be done.
“Adding automation efficiencies has allowed us to shorten our overall testing window by at least a half,” says Trimper. “We have a lot of coordination with the business and the testing takes a bit of time so to be able to reduce it by more than half is wonderful. If we do have to retest we know we can do it quickly as opposed to having a long drawn out relay cycle.”
Using automation to free testers from routine tasks enables them to undertake more important work and shortens release cycles.
“I’m very happy to be leveraging UFT One and ALM because we now have one set of tools that are meant to work together to allow us to test our desktop applications, websites and web applications, and to conduct work with responsive websites,” adds Trimper. “They’re going to allow us to grow into device testing and mobile testing and because they’re meant to talk to each other they can tell an end-to-end story of a member or a provider very well. We can tell one story with one set of tools where we speak one language. We have a common understanding of all that is in there, and it really brings everything together quite nicely.”
I’m very happy to be leveraging the Micro Focus UFT One and ALM tools because they allow us to have one set of tools that are meant to work together. We can tell one end-to-end story with one set of tools so we have a common understanding of all that is in there and it really brings everything together quite nicely.
I think it’s incredibly important to continue to work with the Micro Focus team to understand the products that you have, the capabilities you have, and what features and functionality are still out there for you.
