Verisk

The Customer

Verisk is a critical provider of business critical decision making data for banks, utilities, insurance companies, and other corporate entities. As a publicly traded company with over 1,800 employees, they are a market leader working with many of the world’s leading brands. Their easy to use web and mobile interfaces allow customers to quickly get the data they need to make sound decisions and minimize the risk of bringing on new clients. 

The Environment

Verisk provides a comprehensive suite of tools to allow customers to access the data they need to make informed decisions quickly. Their databases contain millions of unique records that users can access quickly through a self service interface. They support thousands of enterprises across the world, with many users accessing the system every day, so they need to guarantee performance and uptime. Adding to the complexity of the environment is the requirement to support a web interface as well as mobile support for their customers.  

The Vision

For Verisk, they must provide a dependable service that is always available and working as expected, 24x7x365. For those that rely on Verisk to make critical business decisions daily, they must be able to count on the app to work whenever they need it. Because this is a business critical application, when the application is not running, customers are unable to do their job. With more and more data being added to the database every day, Verisk needed to focus on tools that could scale to meet this challenge.  

The Challenge

Though Verisk had started on the path of test automation, the tools that were in place were difficult to use and test creation was a time consuming activity. Because the application is constantly expanding, the automation deficit was continuing to grow. Many of the existing automated tests were brittle and would break often, so much of the time available for creating automated tests needed to be focused on automated test maintenance instead. 

The Process

Felipe Centeno, Software Developer at Verisk, Paige Miller, Quality Analyst at Verisk, and Ricky Larsen, Developer at Verisk, conducted a thorough search of the market and available tools that would meet the challenges of their complex enterprise environment. He conducted a wide search encompassing over 60 different automated testing tools. They mostly considered free or open source tools which would fit better within their tooling budget and build on top of some of their early learnings using pure Appium. TestProject was one of the first free tools that Verisk came across and made it to the short list of roughly 10 tools. The team also researched Ranorex, Cypress, Appium, and TestComplete. 

The Requirements

After collecting the learnings from their past experiences in test automation, the team was ready to evaluate the vendors who made it to the short list. Some of the main requirements of the new tool included: 

• Ability to support Web applications, Mobile applications, and even API’s
• Easy to learn and adopt, even for those new to test automation
• Support for advanced scripting approaches and ability to import tests via SDK
• Easy to configure job scheduling with API to integrate to Azure DevOps
• Affordable, so the cost was feasible within their broader testing budget

With a comprehensive list of features created, the team would be able to narrow down the short list to a selected testing tool for Verisk.

The Search

Verisk’s evaluation was fairly thorough, spanning over the course of roughly a month. The initial requirement of cross platform support for web, mobile, and API’s was met by very few of the tools.  Additionally, many of the comprehensive tools required a large investment and were outside of the budget scoped for this initiative. With TestProject seeming to have most, if not all of the features Verisk was looking for, it became a clear winner. The main features that sold the team on TestProject were:

• TestProject has best in class support for web, mobile, and API’s in one interface
• TestProject offers the ability to easily import existing Selenium and Appium tests in multiple languages including Java, Python, and C#
• TestProject provides an easy onboarding experience for non-technical users or those with limited testing experience
• TestProject has built in job scheduling with support for running tests within TestProject or via trigger from CI/CD tools via API, allowing for Azure DevOps integration
• TestProject offers robust support at no cost via live chat, forum, and complete documentation
• TestProject is 100% free, including the platform, hosting, as well as live support

With the team keen to implement TestProject, they were ready to embark on the journey of implementing TestProject within Verisk.

The Implementation

The process of getting TestProject up and running at Verisk was a relatively quick one, with 3 team members able to get the team implemented in a matter of roughly 2 weeks. With a strong recorder, teams were able to create automated tests quickly with no coding required. The TestProject support team was closely involved in answering questions early on, both via live chat and in the support forum.  After only a few weeks, Verisk had seen substantial increases in their automated test coverage.  TestProject is now being used across all of the testers within the team.

The Results

With TestProject fully deployed, the team has been able to see tremendous improvements to automated testing, including: 

• Decrease in tester onboarding time, with almost all resources up to speed in a couple of weeks
• Decrease in test execution time, improving their ability to evaluate new features quickly, compared with Appium on its own
• Reduction in test maintenance effort, with more robust locator strategies and a shared element repository and data driven testing approach
• Improved integration and visibility between tools in the pipeline, including Azure DevOps
• Cost savings on tooling infrastructure, with TestProject being free

Overall, the benefits of TestProject have been critical to supporting Verisk’s position as the market leader for critical decision making data. 

The Advice

Overall, the team recommends TestProject to friends and other organizations looking to build test automation coverage quickly. Their advice to ensure a successful implementation is as follows: 

1. Learn XPath. Knowing all of the different ways you can leverage it (including more complex functions) will expand your skillset within any automation tool, TestProject included.
2. Leverage the recorder. It can allow users of any skill set to create robust and maintainable tests with minimal time or training.
3. Use the element repository. A page object model will keep your test maintenance to a minimum. 
4. Explore the API. The API has helped us build the custom integrations we need, including to Azure DevOps and our own custom util tool.
5. Take advantage of the amazing support team and community in the forum and blog. With their awesome support, there should be no issues that can’t be solved quickly.