Client Success | Insuresoft
Insuresoft Selects Surgient to Accelerate Software Delivery Cycles
“With automation tools that drastically reduce the manual involvement of our product development staff, the combined Surgient Virtual Automation Platform and HP Quality Center solution enables us to more quickly test and roll out new software applications.”
Chris Blair, Vice President of Product Management, Insuresoft
Executive Summary
Customer Profile
Insuresoft is the leading insurance software provider for the property and casualty insurance industry.
Challenge
Aggressive release schedules of multi-tier applications, manual testing processes and under-utilized, distributed resources prove costly and time-consuming.
Solution
Surgient Virtual Automation Platform with QA/Test Solution combined with HP Quality Center improves Insuresoft’s QA/Test cycle efficiency.
Benefits
- Better utilization of HW resources increased deployed baseline images 250 % in six months
- Eliminated development staff downtime
- Automated scheduling, setup and teardown of test environments
- Accelerated product test cycles without sacrificing quality
- Provided customers with on-demand Web access to Insuresoft testing environments
- Helped maintain the highest levels of customer service
Case Study
Policy Processing Software for Insurance Carriers
Founded in 1993, Insuresoft is a Microsoft Gold-Certified independent software vendor delivering insurance software to the property and casualty insurance industry. The company offers a suite of products and services designed for managing general agents and insurance carriers in North America. Privately-held and based in University Park, Illinois, with offices in Alabama and Minnesota, its Diamond System automated policy processing solution is used by more than 17 carriers nationwide.
Costly Lab Management Process
With very aggressive release cycles for its insurance process automation solutions—the Diamond System—Insuresoft needed to bring new products to market more quickly, without sacrificing quality. Each year, the company also delivers three main product releases, numerous other implementations in response to state regulations and iterative releases for various customers’ customizations. To compound the problem, all of Insuresoft’s multi-tier applications have complicated configurations.
“We need to make frequent updates to our software applications in order to ensure that we remain current with new insurance industry regulations and our customers’ constantly changing business needs,” said Chris Blair, vice president of product management for Insuresoft.
Insuresoft’s hardware investments were considerable, resulting in a ratio of 2.5 machines to each employee with new hardware purchased for each new hire. System utilization was typically low with 35 server-class machines running at 10 to 30 percent capacity, and sitting idle the rest of the time until a particular implementation was needed. Furthermore, with testing and QA conducted in three geographically-dispersed offices, the hardware—consisting of two to three servers per implementation—and installation, configuration and setup had to be replicated for each office. Consequently, there were varying degrees of results due to different hardware, hardware configurations, patch and upgrades of software. Despite the abundance of underutilized hardware, Insuresoft developers repeatedly requested additional equipment to test, develop, analyze and deploy the applications.
In addition to the high cost of hardware, Insuresoft’s test and QA processes were time consuming. Each machine took up to two hours to setup, configure, test and then return to its original state or tear down. This meant hours of unscheduled work before developers could actually perform the testing. Once the machines were ready and a tester found a defect, the development team had to replicate the environment and defect, fix it and then teardown the environment before they could go back to what they were doing before the interruption.
Surgient and HP Automate Insuresoft’s Testing/QA Process
Insuresoft realized it couldn’t solve its lab management problem simply by purchasing additional hardware, because the hardware costs didn’t equal the value the company was getting out of the investments. The product management department decided to look for a solution that would both accelerate the software delivery cycle and better utilize the company’s considerable hardware investments.
“Since we were already using HP Quality Center for test management we really wanted to find a solution that would integrate with it and that would, if possible, also automate the entire testing process,” said Blair. “We also wanted a centralized place to manage baseline images and give us the ability to manage multi-tier environments. And with distributed teams in three different offices, including customers nationwide, we also wanted the solution to be accessible via the Web.”
After careful evaluation, Insuresoft selected the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform. The company replaced its resourceintensive, under-utilized QA/Test environment and processes with an automated process that combines the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform, with QA/Test Solution and HP Quality Center to accelerate its software delivery cycles, improve the efficiency of its software QA/Test cycle and deliver its products and services to customers more quickly.
The Results: An End-to-End Solution for Sustained Success
Insuresoft’s internal software testers use Surgient’s QA/Test Solution and HP Quality Center to choose an environment and a set of tests to run. The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform then automatically deploys the environment and tests. Surgient also tracks the actual performance of the application being tested, providing Insuresoft developers with the insight required to ensure the application is ready for production. By using Surgient to automate the testing proccesses of its new applications, Insuresoft can more quickly find and fix a higher percentage of bugs, helping ensure higher customer satisfaction rates.
“Surgient Virtual Automation Platform combined with HP Quality Center gives us an end-to-end solution that automates our testing process from configuration to deployment,” said Blair. “Prior to Surgient we could deploy 30 baseline images. Within six months of installation, we were able to deploy up to 75 baseline images for less than the cost of a server-class machine.”
Insuresoft uses the combined HP-Surgient platform for its most critical testing tasks, including:
- Configuration and Teardown
The integration with HP Quality Center allows Insuresoft to use the HP Quality Center interface and Surgient’s test scheduling capability. Surgient configures the environment and directs HP Quality Center on which tests to perform. When the test is complete, Surgient tears down the environment and generates a report with results. - Guaranteed Resources, Scheduled or On-demand
Insuresoft offers its internal software team access to the HP-Surgient automated testing solution via HP Quality Center’s interface and manages the requested resources through Surgient’s scheduling capability. Insuresoft QA/test team is now able to configure multiple types of systems themselves when they need them, instead of having to wait for additional hardware. The new process is cost and time effective for both customers and internal teams. - Snapshot
Surgient’s Snapshot capability eliminates downtime for Insuresoft developers. Now, when Insuresoft QA finds a defect, the analyst verifies the defect and the developer is able to access the same image, easily see the defect, fix it in real-time and go back to what they were doing, with no downtime.
