This major multi-line insurance provider serves individuals, small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as large and multi-national organisations with life and general insurance products in more than 200 countries across the world.
"We worked with both companies to define the mapping between the source and target systems, and build the data-transformation rules. First, we needed to prove that the process would work, which meant testing a representative sample of around 10% of policies. Manual testing required around 30 minutes per policy: on that basis, we were never going to finish testing before the deadline.”
Daniel Biondi CTO, Australia and New Zealand, DXC Technology
Challenge
Having recently acquired the life insurance business of another financial services organisation, the Australian arm of this global insurance company needed to transform the incoming data to fit its own schemas. With 719,000 policy records, each containing up to 40 fields, this was an enormous and highly complex project. Insurance policy data is often sensitive, so it was also necessary to impose access restrictions.
With speed of integration a critical factor in delivering rapid value from a corporate acquisition, an aggressive deadline was in place to complete the project.
Solution
As part of its acquisition of the life insurance business, the insurer appointed DXC Technology as its strategic partner to execute the data migration and transformation program. With extensive insurance industry expertise, an ecosystem of partners and a presence in more than 70 countries, DXC had both the scale and the skills required to meet the insurer’s needs.
DXC chose Micro Focus UFT One to accelerate the testing workstream. “The complexity of all the possible permutations of policy data is huge,” says Biondi. “Without automation, testing would have been slow and prone to error. This was about automation first, then manual as the fallback. We selected UFT One and engaged the Micro Focus Professional Services team to help us set up the required scripts and plan the testing regime.”
"Each test run of transformed data through UFT One produced a colour-coded spreadsheet for root-cause analysis confirming the pass or failed result, highlighting mismatches and discrepancies between source and target applications.”
Lyle Heckrath Testing Lead, Insurance Industry, Australia and New Zealand, DXC Technology
Overcoming complexity
The testing was divided into three phases by product groups, with an iterative process of testing, finding errors, and working with stakeholders to improve data quality, refine scripts, and then re-testing. Validations and checkpoints were built into the scripts to minimise manual effort.
To simplify the management and use of the scripts, Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center was used as the single central repository — enabling all teams to access the scripts quickly and easily. For compliance with data protection and security standards, the populated test results – output as spreadsheet files – were delivered to a secure fileserver with a restricted userbase. As part of the testing, screenshots were also captured from UFT One to prove the validation of specified fields in the target applications.
“Each test run of transformed data through UFT One produced a colour-coded spreadsheet for root-cause analysis confirming the pass or failed result, highlighting mismatches and discrepancies between source and target applications,” says Lyle Heckrath, Testing Lead, Insurance Industry, Australia and New Zealand at DXC Technology. “An execution cycle can range between 500 and 1000 records with up to 40 fields per record to be validated, which results in a total of up to 40,000 validations. Based on the output, we determined the cause of failure and worked with the relevant teams to resolve that issue.”
Major gains in speed and quality
DXC successfully tested the migrated data across a representational sample of around 10% of the 719,000 records within the tight deadline required by the insurer. Testing automation significantly increased the volume of records that could be tested, from five policies per execution to between 100 and 500. Automated testing is much faster than manual testing, so DXC was able to execute testing on 100 records per hour versus two records per hour previously. In addition, the ability to execute multiple scripts simultaneously enabled an increased volume of testing with the same headcount. Equally, the same tester could be assigned to multiple streams, mitigating the risk of delays.
“In addition to increasing testing volumes by up to a factor of 100, UFT One enabled us to follow an iterative process,” says Heckrath. “The real value of automation is to simplify and accelerate testing iterations.”
Automation also contributed to higher quality through increased volumes. “With UFT One, we were able to build validations to test a given set of records whether it was a small sample or a large volume.
Moreover, we went one step further and provided screenshots of the results in accordance with regulatory compliance and security to give the insurer peace of mind,” adds Biondi.
The use of UFT One and ALM/Quality Center has resulted in significant benefits, both from the reduced need to engage manual testers as well as the ability to reuse testing scripts. The reusability of scripts also cut the time required for test preparation, enabling greater focus on execution.
Based on the experience gained from this project, DXC now has a best-practice framework for rapidly executing similar projects for other clients facing large data transformation and migration challenges.
“Working with Micro Focus and using UFT One helped us to meet the insurer’s tight timelines for testing the migrated and transformed data,” says Biondi. “We were able to meet the requirements around quality, speed and security, and ultimately our work contributed to a seamless migration for policyholders joining the insurer’s business.”
