Insurer Implements Automation for Increased Productivity and Shorter Release Cycles

Challenge

The Danish insurance company, GF Forsikring, relies on a series of technologies to deliver their digital services, from customer-facing self-service applications to core business systems.

Assuring quality through rigorous testing of these platforms is essential in connection with system updates, but proved to be a significant challenge to IT Architect Claes-Jan Wolff and his team, prior to the introduction of Leapwork; tedious, time-consuming regression tests were taking up too much time and creating bottlenecks in the release cycle.

“Testing had become a slow, burdensome process for us,” said Wolff. He knew that automation was a part of the solution, so he was looking for an automation tool that could support faster releases. He was specifically looking for a testing tool with a short learning curve that would fit with the SCRUM team’s three-week sprints.

The team had previously tried out various tools for test automation without much success. The tools took too long to learn and required too much maintenance. As a result, the time spent on automating superseded the time saved from eliminating manual testing. “Maintaining our test cases was a nightmare,” Wolff said. These solutions simply weren’t sustainable.

In addition to ease-of-use, an important criteria for the testing tool was cross-platform functionality. Wolff and his team were looking to automate several technologies:

• A desktop-based end-to-end insurance management system, built on Oracle Forms, for policy management, claims, accounting, etc. This system is used by more than 400 people daily.
• Web applications for e.g. insurance price comparison, based on C# and Sitecore.
• Cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
• Integrations with public sector services, e.g. an online insurance guide.

The desktop-based insurance management system in particular was a pain. It was an older system that had been through heavy customization making it a challenge to test with conventional automation approaches.

Impact

As a result of implementing Leapwork’s automation platform, GF Forsikring improved their release cycles on several fronts:

• Release cycles have been shortened from 8 to 3 weeks. The SCRUM teams can now live up to their objective of “failing fast” and spend less time fixing bugs.
• 95% of regression tests for their business-critical insurance management system are now automated.
• Building new automated test cases takes less than a day.
• Combined, testers across the SCRUM teams spend a few days a week working with automated test cases, and during sprints they have freed up a lot of time to do other tasks than regression tests.
• Management at the company are satisfied with the increase in product features and the decrease in bugs.