Insurers have mostly replaced traditional software testing and quality assurance (based on the Waterfall methodology) with a new set of testing approaches based on variations of Agile. Testing is no longer confined to the quality assurance department. Much of modern testing and QA is located within product development Scrum teams. Testing is now continuous, promotions to new environments happen in real-time, and changes may need validation in areas beyond the project’s scope. This evolution in testing is mostly thanks to Agile, cloud, and third-party SaaS integrations.
Agile transforms traditional QA.
Agile combines QA teams with the teams that are building, configuring, and releasing software. Agile teams require new documentation and tracking tools (e.g., Jira, Retrace, ActiveCollab). These tools also help ensure test case reusability and proper use of automated test harnesses and testbeds.
It’s also important to note that testing approaches will vary based on Agile methodology (e.g., Lean, SAFe, XP). Depending on the Agile methodology, some testing will involve pair programming, frequent releases, and short development cycles.
Cloud has added an additional level of complexity.
Many insurers work in multiple cloud and hosted environments for legacy technology. Test environments will often need to traverse different clouds to cover the full scope of increments and user stories. Infrastructure and software components can change in one or more cloud environments.
The central QA domain area will have to create “guard rails” around testing these environments and own the relationships with those companies. The result is that the QA function may be a hybrid of people within sprint teams, a central QA domain area, and various test teams located in other companies.
DevOps and microservices may also require changes in testing types.
Only the component or service needs to be tested within an increment, as opposed to testing across the overall QA center of excellence. In a DevOps environment, the developers, testers, solutions architects, and software operations teams covering release and change management become combined. This creates a new type of quality engineering role at the intersection of testing DevOps and Agile. Their focus is on products, not projects, and they have greater autonomy.
In some ways, insurer testing needs have not changed. But the frequency of testing and the level of automation have significantly increased. Through Agile, high-quality code is going into production, reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing business satisfaction. QA and testing will continue to evolve in the 2020s and beyond to support new development methodologies and AI-based automation.
See our report QA/Testing in Agile Organizations and Cloud Environments for more on this subject.
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