The Client
Close to a 100 years since its foundation, this international insurance company dominates the Dutch market and boasts an impressive product portfolio in the insurance sector. The client’s main focus falls within the Netherlands’ territory, but with an eye for global expansion. The client is also known as the sponsor and organizer for numerous charitable events of repute.
The Situation
As part of their growth and expansion plan, the client wants to simplify the insurance process for present and future customers through a responsive website complete with a separate user area, where customers can manage existing insurance policies. At the project start, the client has only a single content site, which has to be redesigned, restructured and tested. Through this new user-oriented platform, the client seeks to improve their market positions and gain a stronger reputation. In scope, the project is large given there are 21 different insurance types that need integration.
The Challenge
Communication defined itself as the main challenge throughout the project as the workload was split not only between in-house and contracted teams, but also third party programmers. This resulted in significant difficulties when it came to balancing team responsibilities and communication issues. Needless to say, work progress suffered in the initial stages.
The Quality House team had to learn how to operate the client’s CMS in order to test its full integration with the site. Language also presented obstacles as the website, its components and one of the 3 bug tracking systems were all in Dutch. At the same time, the client formed their own team tasked to write code while the system was in early development stages, which lead to constant regression testing and branches.
The Quality House team had to learn how to operate the client’s CMS in order to test its full integration with the site. Language also presented obstacles as the website, its components and one of the 3 bug tracking systems were all in Dutch. At the same time, the client formed their own team tasked to write code while the system was in early development stages, which lead to constant regression testing and branches.
The Objective
The client assigned Quality House to oversee the testing of 21 insurance products and an end user zone – all in the early development stages. Our work had to be accomplished in concert with the client’s code-writing team. The chief objective is to meet the client’s requirements, finalize the full integration of all project systems, catch and fix high priority bugs within the given deadline.
The Solution
To better understand the scope of the project, Quality House had to work with 5 branches with a singular test environment and one acceptance, and 3 bug tracking systems - Bugtracker, TFS and TFSonline. We initiated the project with a thorough business requirements’ review and analysis before creating test cases and commencing their execution. Operatives took charge of the integration between different components and outside systems, test automation, processed data verification and its correct display, and regression testing on the client’s existing site and components.
Sitecore served as the CMS for the project and the team relied on Selenium WebDriver for the test automation. Additional tools used for the different testing types include Visual Studio 2010, Fiddler 2, Google chrome emulator, Selenium IDE and Firebug.
In the initial stages, the work done in Scrum did not adhere to the planned pace. To increase productivity, Quality House removed the lengthy grooming meetings in favor for shorter 15-minute reviews of user stories 2-3 days before testing where any uncertainties were cleared. This reduced meeting times by 3 hours per week per person. The team also allocated more inexperienced members to creating reusable functionalities.
Before each test case commenced, we only used 10 minutes tops to discuss labor distribution, information exchange regarding the errors founds in different products and possible problems the team may encounter with their solutions.
Sitecore served as the CMS for the project and the team relied on Selenium WebDriver for the test automation. Additional tools used for the different testing types include Visual Studio 2010, Fiddler 2, Google chrome emulator, Selenium IDE and Firebug.
In the initial stages, the work done in Scrum did not adhere to the planned pace. To increase productivity, Quality House removed the lengthy grooming meetings in favor for shorter 15-minute reviews of user stories 2-3 days before testing where any uncertainties were cleared. This reduced meeting times by 3 hours per week per person. The team also allocated more inexperienced members to creating reusable functionalities.
Before each test case commenced, we only used 10 minutes tops to discuss labor distribution, information exchange regarding the errors founds in different products and possible problems the team may encounter with their solutions.
The Conclusion
Once the final acceptance tests were completed, the client expressed their satisfaction with the product’s performance and quality, the level of cooperation and execution time, even though in the end, the team did not meet the initial deadline. What won the client’s admiration had to with the dedication to detail in every branch. The client released a functional product to a warm reception by long-time customers due to its improved user experience resulting from our quality assurance.