“Celsior has been able to provide significant cost and time-to-market reduction, not only through the use of lower-cost, offshore Celsior personnel, but more importantly through testing automation and avoidance of post-release rework.”

Challenges

A top-tier, American property & casualty (P&C) insurance organization was running its business on out-of-date proprietary software, which was difficult to maintain—particularly due to the retirement of skilled internal personnel. Viewing modernization and agility as critical to its business, the client decided to embark on a huge, multi-year digital transformation project to move to the cloud-based Guidewire platform.

The organization selected one of the world’s premiere professional services firms to lead the transformation. The work done by the firm was top quality—albeit quite expensive. Thus, over time the insurance organization looked for portions of the project that could be offloaded to less expensive, high-quality service providers who could work together with the insurance organization and the professional services firm.

The insurance organization’s CIO had prior experience working with Celsior. The leader knew both the quality delivery and collaborative approach that Celsior brought to its projects and reached out to us about starting to take over QE testing functions in support of the Guidewire transformation.

Our solution

The transition of Guidewire QE testing functions to Celsior started small, with several personnel testing applications that would integrate with Guidewire. Based on our excellent work, the client decided to move forward with transitioning actual Guidewire testing to the Celsior QE team. This team, which grew over time to 50 personnel, is distributed with a U.S.-based leader and most of the rest of the team located in India. We were able to quickly bring experienced Guidewire personnel onto the project, so the learning curve was minimal.

Testing automation of the Guidewire platform and associated applications was based initially on ReadyAPI and the organization’s Selenium-based framework. We integrated additional capabilities from our own Celsior Selenium framework—where the organization’s Selenium-based framework was inadequate. Two high-importance areas where this was key have been AI-based self-healing scripts and data validation.

One of the limitations of much testing automation is that manual work is required to correct the automation scripts when, for example, the application’s user interface changes. We integrated and trained an open-source AI engine so that if the automation scripts cannot find an object, they look for a similar object in a listbox or elsewhere.

Through AI use, in many cases the automation scripts can self-heal, rather than requiring manual updates. Based on experience and robust training of the AI engine, we have been able to achieve high confidence in the self-healing results.

Data validation is another key area in which we added value. The client previously had no automation of data validation, and we were able to provide this through our testing framework. Close to a third of our team now supports automated and manual data validation for ETL, general database, etc. Given the client’s wide usage of cloud-based Snowflake data warehouses, we added Snowflake support to our Selenium framework.

We also added value through the implementation of testing solutions on AWS-Lambda and other AWS cloud services and through the use of an autobatch tool for automation of WCAG testing.

Throughout the project, we developed and delivered a comprehensive set of daily and weekly QE reports to keep all stakeholders well informed.

A key element of project success has been that the Guidewire transformation project is managed as a single team encompassing the client’s internal personnel, the professional services firm’s personnel, and the Celsior personnel. Unlike projects where different points of view and motivations result in conflicts and dysfunction, the project succeeds through its collaborative, single-team spirit.

Business outcomes

The overall Guidewire transformation project is now approximately halfway through its multi-year process and continues to be successful.

We have provided end-to-end automation of over 1,000 test scripts for various Guidewire modules. Our QE automation has been able to provide 80-to-90%-time savings—specifically in data validation.

Celsior has lowered the risk of the Guidewire transformation project and helped to ensure its ultimate success with strong quality engineering expertise. Overall, the client has been pleased with our contributions and really loves working with us.

Based on the continued success of the project, the firm has now engaged Celsior for additional work such as the help desk for specific Guidewire modules.