Challenge

In an increasingly competitive industry, health insurers need to control costs, retain members, and focus on value-based delivery and prevention, with services such as health coaching.

To meet these challenges, and deliver services more flexibly, Helsana’s IT team was embracing digital transformation, DevOps processes, and Agile software delivery. With this ‘shift-left’ approach, Helsana was interested in automating its software testing practices, as Lorenzo Dimopoulos, Lead Quality & Compliance for Helsana, explains further: “We have a complex application landscape with many integration points, and we knew bringing test automation to our infrastructure would not be a simple process. We already use Micro Focus ALM and UFT One alongside a manual testing process. We chose a couple of key applications, including our CRM solution that is used by most employees, to develop an automated testing framework with reusable processes that we could use in different scenarios.”

Helsana works closely with trusted partner PQM Consulting, and the team turned to PQM for guidance on how to support a more frequent release schedule without compromising the application quality.

Solution

Helsana and PQM had positive experiences with the existing Micro Focus solutions. ALM is used as the main test management suite; from planning releases to covering the full scope of functional and non-functional requirements testing. ALM also manages the release process. The test results trigger a release go-live with a customized release workflow. ALM data is used to report on test coverage and results from all live projects. Test results are also used for audits. Test cases are created automatically or manually in ALM for a standard test design approach.

When they saw that Micro Focus UFT Developer (ex-LeanFT) is a lightweight functional testing solution developed specifically for continuous testing and continuous integration, they were happy to evaluate this. UFT Developer is a ‘shift-left’ solution that combines the best features of code-driven testing with the power of UFT One. This support Agile and DevOps teams in the creation of tests through an integrated plugin for standard IDEs.

Stefan Lago, Technician for PQM, led the implementation process: “It was very easy to get started with UFT Developer, and the first test results on one of our web applications were really encouraging. The challenge of course was to build an extensible and reusable test framework. Being an insurance company, Helsana has many security considerations and endto-end processes that need to be taken into account. However, adopting UFT Developer, in an easy-to-deploy Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, gave us a great start.”

In a continuous integration cycle, changes to the CRM solution are made by development during the day, and then tested through the automated UFT Developer-driven framework during the night, focusing on both functional and regression testing, to ensure that new features haven’t adversely affected any other application code. When the team comes in the next morning, results are reviewed, and corrective action is taken before the version is released. Dimopoulos comments: “Our CRM testing process was manual before the UFT Developer introduction, and so could clearly not be done overnight. In reality, we could not test as regularly or as comprehensively as we do now, and this meant a slower time-to-market.”

UFT Developer is also used as a framework for customers and agents to check insurance policy pricing. 280 test cases support this complex operation in a fully automated manner.

Working with UFT Developer encourages better collaboration between developers and QA engineers. UFT Developer’s detailed description of test execution flow, including clear, actionable reasons for test failure at each step, provides a simple daily checkpoint so that everyone is on the same page and understands the next steps.

Results

UFT Developer supports simple test processes with open standards to aid collaboration throughout the application lifecycle. Test cases are easy and cost-effective to create, maintain, and reuse. Dimopoulos thinks back to the manual test process for the CRM solution: “We had 220 test cases that were manually executed against our CRM application, for every new version. Following the introduction of UFT Developer, and our simplified automated testing framework, we have consolidated these into just 46 automated UFT Developer test cases, with exactly the same coverage.”

Fabrizio Sunna, Test Automation Business Lead for Helsana, concludes: “With UFT Developer, we release higher quality software and deliver new functionality faster and more frequently. It gives us a great platform to expand our thinking around Agile processes and DevOps. We want to increase our application coverage and integration and have created a scalable test framework to achieve this.”