Problem

This company was experiencing too many defects found late in production and spending uncontrollable amounts of money to address them. In addition, the company used outdated approaches to identifying what it believed were the right software tests to provide sufficient coverage. On their own, teams did their best to apply a risk-based approach to test design that relied too heavily on application and SME knowledge. Tests were manually selected, which inherently led to critical gaps in test coverage, costly defects to address, and test suites that were too large to manually execute and maintain.

Challenges

Solution

The health insurance provider enlisted the support of one of the largest testing services providers in the world. With the provider’s guidance and support, stakeholders identified 15 projects across the organization that were experiencing the most significant testing challenges. The project team planned three phases of implementing Hexawise across these projects to optimize their regression suites:

Once trainings and pilots were completed to develop expertise and demonstrate the value of Hexawise for a smaller scope of projects, the expertise and approaches were applied to the broader regression suites. From there, with Hexawise, teams generated fewer tests to maintain for ongoing regression efforts and tests that would provide complete coverage of every system critical interaction using Hexawise’s superior, optimized test generation methods. Hexawise systematically eliminated every single wasteful idea and test within the manually-written test suites, while also ensuring that every critical interaction within their requirements were now covered with the new Hexawise tests.

The team approached this broad optimization effort in “waves” - strategically choosing similar sets of tests within the suite until the entire effort was complete. Once optimized tests were generated within these waves, Hexawise Automate was used to restructure the bank’s approaches to test automation within its center of excellence. With Automate, the team took a data-driven approach to designing automated tests using the tool’s Gherkin, “Given-When-Then”, Behavior-Driven Development-style scripting methods. Since Hexawise takes a one-to-many approach to automated test generation, fewer scripts would inherently need to be maintained in the future when changes were necessary. In addition, the scripts were designed to provide reusability in the future - when new requirements would be released, teams could pull from existing assets to create new scripts. This would further accelerate the time and effort savings during the test planning and documentation phases.