Model based Test Automation for Guidewire InsuranceSuite

As per a 2017 Gartner report, Policy Administration System (PAS) implementation & legacy modernization are few of the key areas that Insurance companies are focusing to improve customer experience and to enable self-service for the policyholders. Insurers are also increasingly leaning towards configurable, rule-based, commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) packaged solutions like Guidewire InsuranceSuite versus building in house applications. This reduces the implementation costs and accelerates time-to-market. Depending on the number of LOBs, products, and geographies in scope, carriers could save anywhere from 6 months to 2 years with the packaged implementations.

In typical PAS projects, software testing constitutes around 25-30% of overall program budget and needs considerable allocation of resources and time to ensure that quality code is delivered. Traditionally, testing process starts with test scenario design, test case creation and test data preparation – which are mostly manual, resulting in considerable time and cost.

It is not very uncommon that implementation costs (and in turn testing costs) go up midstream due to changing business requirements, regulatory changes, and enhancements to existing functionalities arising from system limitations, additional upstream and downstream system integrations etc. With traditional testing approach, challenges will compound the testing costs, not considering the length and number of test cycles, defect retests and regression cycles.

With the increased adoption of agile methodologies and lean principles across the industry, advancements in automation technologies and contemporary solutions available in the market, standard frameworks can be built to automate testing most of the business processes and rules.

Hexaware’s Automation Framework for Guidewire suite of products

‘Integrated Design2Execution’ (iD2E) is one such automation framework designed by Hexaware, which leverages model-based testing (MBT) tool, Conformiq, for test design automation. ‘iD2E’ seamlessly integrates Model Based Testing with test execution automation suite, for end to end automation. From test case design to script generation to execution and reporting, iD2E automates the most complex and critical tasks and brings intelligence and optimization to testing.

Conceptual View of Test Automation

Hexaware’s Model Based Testing Approach for Guidewire

The Model Based Testing (MBT) approach facilitates the automatic generation of test cases, using models of the desired system behavior. Hexaware has pre-built Functional models, specific to Guidewire suite of products, to generate test cases. These include functionalities that come with out-of-the-box Guidewire InsuranceSuite as depicted below:

The models built with the help of activity diagrams and structure diagrams represents the process flows and the screen flows of the business requirements. The test cases generated are then exported to an automation test suite like Selenium where automation components for Guidewire have been pre-built. These automatically generate test scripts for end-to-end automation.
Some of the benefits of MBT include:

• High coverage, productivity and faster Delivery
• Improved Quality Assurance
• 100% test documentation
• 100% traceability against the requirements
• Easy to maintain and review
• Seamless integration with popular test execution automation tools like Selenium, UFT

Implementing iD2E framework for Guidewire InsuranceSuite helps:

• Deliver 60% faster
• Reduces costs by over 40%
• Increases Manageability by 50%

Posted by :
Subbu Bestha
subramanyamb@hexaware.com
Anuroop Suvarna
AnuroopS@hexaware.com