January 3, 2023

By: Aravind Rudramanijayapal, Senior Consultant, BFSI, LTIMindtree

Present-day insurance testing

Today, insurance companies operate with multiple software/products across the business value chain encompassing new business, policy admin, underwriting, rating, claims, billing, document management, etc. In the current digital world, to reduce costs and meet different customer needs, they add applications to their landscape to cater to additional functionalities that are not supported by the current applications. In addition, these applications could be on different platforms and technologies.

Currently, insurance testing follows a traditional practice where test cases are built at an application level and are subjected to a sequential flow of testing stages as depicted below:

In this approach, testers will spend all their effort in building numerous system test cases to test an individual application better. However, at one point of time, the test cases will grow out of control, and some become redundant or of no value when considering a business scenario in the whole value chain.

Also, when it comes to System Integration (SIT), User Acceptance (UAT) and End-to-End (E2E) the scenarios are randomly chosen and only selective test cases are tested. This will lead to ignoring complex business scenarios cutting across various application stack, key alternate flows, role-based scenarios, etc. This would also oversee any workflows or interfaces that need to be tested between applications and ultimately cause an overload in the regression test suite for which UAT and E2E test scenarios act as a base.

Lean testing and Lean test suite:

Lean, by definition, means thin and healthy. It denotes eliminating waste that is non-essential and adds no value for a product. Lean testing essentially means context-driven testing, which could analyze the system holistically. It should ensure that the entire system is tested for the purpose it is intended for, rather than satisfying the requirements of individual applications or user stories.

A Lean testing suite should comprise test scenarios and cases that measure what really is required to be tested, optimize testing effort to concentrate on business process-based/end-to-end scenarios, continuously evaluate as the software is being developed and improve the testing suite incrementally thereupon. The suite needs to be rationalized frequently by removing obsolete test cases and ensuring it covers the end-to-end scenarios across the value chain for any product launch/enhancements.

Example: when a new product needs to be configured, the entire business process should be tested in the system. A sample test scenario would be to “Test the issuance process for a quotation that is bound for a life coverage of $100,000 and for a premium of $500”. This will ensure that the quote, bind, rating, issuance, etc. are tested end-to-end, rather than testing the quote or rating separately.

Principles of Lean testing and how it can be applied to insurance:

Years ago, Lean software development was derived from the seven principles of Lean manufacturing. These principles can be applied to Lean testing as well and below is how they can shape quality insurance testing:

1. Eliminate waste: eliminate test cases that give the same result every time
2. Amplify learning: learn from non-linear information sources. Include a domain insurance expert in the team to carve out the right business scenarios
3. Regularly revise: prioritize features and continuously evaluate the enhancements made in the software to update the test scenarios on a regular basis
4. Rapidly respond: the test suite should ensure quick execution of test cases, leading to faster time-to-market. Faster test cycles could be created by parallelizing test executions
5. Collaborate and communicate: constant discussion and review with the team and insurance domain experts to reduce redundancy in the test suite
6. Maintain transparency and trust: transparency in reporting test results and keeping all stakeholders informed is important to receive trust and constant feedback on how the process can be improved
7. See the whole system: seeing the whole software system, including workflows and interfaces, rather at application level will ensure building the right lean test suite.

Benefits of a Lean testing suite

• Eliminates redundant and repeating test cases that add no value to the business process
• Faster time-to-market any new feature or product, as a Lean testing suite helps in completing the entire test cycle quickly
• Easier to maintain and update the lean test suite periodically when new product or features are added
• Provides a robust regression suite by picking up the main functional and alternate scenarios
• Helps capturing quality defects rather than losing focus on those that are cosmetic and less relevant
• Project teams and product owners can focus on designing new products rather than worrying about the laborious testing process involved
• Helps in building quick automating test suites in the future due to limited and restricted test cases

LTIMindtree’s offering on accelerating product releases to market, MindPronto, brings differentiation in product ideation, design, configuration, and testing process using a ‘Lego’ like building block approach. The solution works on the principle of decomposing products, coverages/benefits into features. These features are brought to life through business rules associated with them and are rolled into a templatized definition of products and coverages, referred to as templates within the tool. These templates are utilized to instantiate the product (plans) and coverages that are sold into the market.

Prominent features of the tool include standardization, reusability, generating synthetic data for testing end-to-end test scenarios, and effective test data management. The tool helps in associating business processes and test scenarios to the product and process hierarchy, and defining test scenarios and generating test data, thereby ensuring comprehensive test scenario coverage, rapid scaling on business knowledge required for testing, and adopting a reusable approach towards test strategy definition for every product launch/update.