BriteCore

The Customer

BriteCore is a fully-managed, cloud native core software platform for property and casualty insurers that supports digital transformation. BriteCore offers a series of integrated modules to enable end-to-end support for the insurance lifecycle, including policy administration, underwriting, rating, billing management, and claims management. BriteCore is a secure web app, deployed using Amazon Web Services and is continually being updated with new features.

The Environment

Quality is a mandatory requirement for the thousands of insurance customers and hundreds of agents that rely on BriteCore daily. With new features constantly being developed by the BriteCore team, there are regular, often nightly updates that need thorough testing for regression as well as new feature compatibility. Add in the complexity of managing their various clients’ environments and unique data and the amount of testing to be done begins to look daunting. 

The Vision

The need to be able to release regularly while maintaining high quality across their numerous modules demanded a shift in the approach to testing. There were practical limitations to the number of technical resources that could be applied to the challenge. The ultimate goal was to achieve nearly 100% automated test coverage for every module tested. Finding a way to increase automated test coverage using a no-code/low-code approach would be crucial.  

The Challenge

Before implementing test automation, it was extremely difficult to ensure the quality of a particular build using manual testing. Releases were frequent with a quick 2 week sprint cycle. The BriteCore platform is mission critical to customers. The risk that a customer would be the first to encounter a bug was becoming unacceptable.  

The Process

Petar Zojcevski, Software QA Lead at BriteCore, began researching tools that could help their teams make real progress towards test automation maturity. He began assembling a short list of automated web application testing tools, many of which were too complex for BriteCore’s requirements. As a qTest customer for test management and reporting, he also reached out to his account manager to see what other tools might be a good fit within the Tricentis portfolio. 

The Requirements

After meeting with various members across the teams, Petar assembled a comprehensive list of requirements for their new testing tool. Particularly, the BriteCore team was interested in a tool which would be: 

• Easy to learn, with a no code option to include team members of all skillsets.
• Able to support web applications, including complex ones as demanded by their customers.
• API with ability to integrate to other popular applications like qTest, JIRA, and Rally.
• Easy to understand reports on build quality for quick decision making.
• Cloud based, and compatible with a containerized environment.
• Robust support and documentation to allow for easy onboarding as the team grows.
• Affordable, so that all team members can contribute to test automation coverage.
  

With these features in mind, the BriteCore team would be able to narrow down the list of tools to those which would work well within their fast paced development environment.

The Search

With time pressure to begin the test automation implementation, the BriteCore team conducted an efficient search of tools on the market. The team came across several more coding focused tools like Cypress.io and Robot Framework which did not align with the vision of having all members of the team contribute to test automation. TestProject was brought to his attention by his Tricentis account manager, and it quickly became one of the leading tools in the evaluation.  After a couple of weeks of evaluation, TestProject became the favorite, due to some key considerations: 

• TestProject supports complex web applications.
• TestProject provides an interface for those who wanted to script as well as those who lacked technical skills.
• TestProject offers quick support via live chat as well as a thorough forum and documentation to ease onboarding.
• TestProject is integrated to qTest and Slack out of the box, allowing for easy communication of test results.
• TestProject is 100% free, including the platform, hosting, as well as live support.

Now that the choice to implement TestProject had been made, the team was ready to embark on the process of implementing TestProject across BriteCore’s numerous application modules.

The Implementation

The process of getting TestProject up and running at BriteCore was relatively painless, with initial results coming in a matter of weeks. The team first focused attention on a single module of BriteCore’s platform, starting to build out a comprehensive regression suite for that application. In under a month, a complete suite of regression tests was completed for that module, allowing the team to make deployments with confidence. Over the first few months, more than 28 BriteCore team members in total have joined the platform and contributed test coverage. Now, the team is directing their attention towards building out automated test coverage for other modules to complete their comprehensive regression testing suite. 

The Results

With TestProject fully deployed, BriteCore has been able to transform testing from a completely manual process to one with high levels of automation, contributing benefits such as: 

• Improvement in automated test coverage, with technical and non-technical users able to create test automation.
• Reduction in defects leaked to production, with most major issues being caught by the automated regression testing executed via TestProject.
• Increase in test coverage, with several modules now covered with automated tests, and a plan to achieve 100% automated test coverage in the next 1-2 years.
• Reduction in manual testing time, from 100% of testing done manually to less than 50% of time spent on manual testing activities.

Overall, the benefits of TestProject have been instrumental in supporting the teams’ shift to agile and continuous deployment.

The Advice

Petar Zojcevski, who led the implementation of TestProject for BriteCore, recommends the solution to other organizations looking to tackle similar challenges. When teams need to test Web, Mobile, and even API applications, TestProject is a clear candidate. With a successful implementation under his belt, his advice to ensure a smooth implementation is as follows: 

1. Start small, and work your way up.  Focus on areas of the application first which are easy to automate and will deliver value. Start with the most common scenarios and build out coverage over time.
2. Make sure your automation lines up with how customers truly use your application.  Understand their favorite features, most used flows, and create representative test data for their most common use cases.
3. Open up a 2 way communication stream between testers and developers. As you automate more and more of your testing, you will find that your developers need to make the application “automation ready” to unlock the highest levels of test automation.
4. Set up a reporting structure to communicate the value of test automation from the very beginning. We’ve made management (including our CEO!) aware of the transformation underway, and their support is critical to our success and continued investment.
5. TestProject support is ready to help at every turn. Most of our users were able to onboard using only the documentation and forum, but the live support is top notch! Take it from someone who has worked in support at great companies like Amazon – you can benefit tremendously from reaching out for assistance!