The company uses its own software, which allows agents to draft insurance policies and draw up contracts. The system was completely developed by the company, using its own resources, and the results underwent only external testing. One out of four tasks that reached the state of testing was returned for revision.
The insurance company approached ICL Services for testing and regulation of the testing process within the company. Cooperation started in September 2018.
With external testing, the customer transferred the verification of the completed tasks to the agents. This caused a large gap in the provision of high-quality system functionality. Since the agents were not professional testers, they could not accurately describe the actions leading to mistakes.
The task was returned for revision, but the developers and analysts spent a lot of time, determining what the problem was. Since the tasks got into the vicious cycle of “development testing”, this resulted in the high percent of returns for revision. As such, in August, 120 tasks were created for testing, and 33 were returned for revision. The return percentage was of 27.5%.
Key Challenges
- Building a system of additional internal software testing
- Reducing the number of tasks returned for revision
- The employees of ICL Services became a necessary link for internal testing. The project involved two testers and a project supervisor that discussed the problem in a separate chat with the analysts and the head of the testing department from the client on a daily basis.
- Every morning, ICL Services testers checked in the task tracker the tasks that were ready for testing and reported what tasks will they undertake — in this way, the client always understood what the specialists were doing.
Testing progress:
- The client company offers alternatives for the optimisation of current processes or the organisation of new ones. He/she creates documentation that describes how a particular system function should work.
- The specialists of the client company write the code according to the terms of reference of the analyst.
- Testers of ICL Services study the task description obtained from the analyst, conduct functional and usability tests and assess whether a certain system function implemented by the developer works properly or not. If the actions in the system do not comply with the description of the test case, the tester returns the task for revision with a detailed description of what went wrong.
- “To correct the error, the developer must first repeat it, and then understand why it occurred. The testers described the sequence of all their actions properly. With this approach, it took a lot less time for the developer to fix bugs”, says Mikhail Livshits, Software Development Project Manager of ICL Services.
- Each task that arrived at the testing stage was a new development or function. Therefore, all tests were conducted manually, without any automated services.
Products and technologies
- Software testing
Results
- In September, when the cooperation began, the percentage of tasks returned for revision decreased to 17.5%. In October, the percentage of returns decreased to 3.23%.
- During the seven months of cooperation with the company, ICL Services testers undertook test cases for each task and described the testing regulations on which the internal testing competence was based.
- Due to internal testing by ICL Services, developers were able to quickly correct errors, thereby accelerating the implementation of new functions. This, in turn, helps the client to provide high-quality service to its customers and use the efforts of the analysts and developers more efficiently.