Qualitest Provides On-Shore Testing Services for a Tier1 Insurance Company

Client Overview

The client is a management company for eight pension funds managing a total of over $20 billion. The company was established for the sole purpose of implementing the comprehensive consolidation of these funds existing systems into a single system, and for providing operational services for the 8 underwriting pension funds.

The three-year project enabled this company to provide multi-vendor network integration services for the customers Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network. The scope of the project included end-to-end network integration and security services, including network design, engineering, deployment maintenance and the overall integration of operations, support and billing systems.

Business Needs and Objectives

The client current information systems handle some 7,000 users, 12TB of data, 6 million I/O operations per hour and produce at least 2,000 reports per month. The systems are linked to thousands of employers, banks and government ministries. These systems were developed through a continuous evolutionary process over the years since the establishment of the funds. Over the years the systems have undergone transformations and conversions according to the progress and availability of technologies. The computer systems are heterogenic and complex and include, among others, platforms such as UNIX, AS400, IBMMF and Windows, as well as a range of databases such as DB400, UDB, DB2, MSSQL, Informix, Oracle and others. As result of the way in which the current systems where developed the customer is required to deal with many difficulties, namely:

• 8 different technological and operational infrastructures each requiring much support
• Data consolidation was very costly along with long lead times
• Outdated and inefficient work procedures
• Low quality data in some of the systems
• High operational, computerization and support costs
• Insufficient customer service

The customer chose Qualitest to provide a full Test Outsourcing Solution for the entire development and implementation process of the new consolidated systems.

Testing Challenges

Kicking-off operations led to various challenges which were:

• Understanding the current systems used by the customer
• Highly Complex business cases and scenarios
• Understanding the end-user perspective of the system
• Testing consolidation of 40 year old code
• Consolidation of requirements of 8 pension funds
• Multiple interfaces
• Building Test Environments for both Load and Volume testing
• Training and Qualifying end-users to take pro-active part in the testing process

The Qualitest Solution

The project spanned 3 years. At the height of the project, 120 people took part including 25 Qualitest employees. A new test center was established just 10 minutes away from the client’s headquarters which allowed for good communications between the different teams and gave the client a leadership position over the entire QA and testing process.

Qualitest established a Testing team on the customer site consisting of a senior manager, a Project Manager, 2 Team Leaders and 12-13 testers.

Qualitest’s involvement in the project started during the project’s initialization phase. The first tasks included reviewing the design process using comprehensive Static Testing Techniques. The end-users were involved in the process from an early stage.

The project included the following tasks:

• Defining the Test Strategy
• Building a Test Lab
• Developing Test Stubs and Drivers
• Test Planning
• Test Execution
• Load, performance and stress Testing
• Creating an automation infrastructure and implement as much of the regression tests automatically as possible
• All the milestones which where expected where completed successfully, on time and on budget.
• The test automation infrastructure developed by Qualitest was extremely effective and cut down on the regression testing time by delivering close to 80% coverage of the testing done at each test cycle on the systems core functionality.
• Top users from each fund took part in the testing process which considerably increased the systems compatibility with the funds needs and requirements, increased the system’s quality and greatly facilitated in the implementation process.
• Ramp-up of the Qualitest team was quick which allowed risk analyses, design review and some project management activities to be delegated to the team early and freed up the project’s leadership team to focus on other important activities earlier then expected.
• An emphasis on load and performance testing at a relatively early stage of the project insured that the systems performance and stability targets where meet and exceeded.