Case Study

Introduction

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. Surgient Virtual Automation Platform with QA/Test Solution combined with HP Quality Center improves Insuresoft’s QA/Test cycle efficiency.

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.

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