Valueleap – Quality Assurance Services at Stratus with BDD

Stratus is highly determined to bring Business Value driven Delivery. And Being Guidewire Consulting Partners, we are constantly focussed to bring value to our clients and other Insurance Carriers using Guidewire as their core system. One of such initiatives is building our in-house competency and constructing a highly trained and certified team with BDD knowledge and experience. This Value oriented Team can be leveraged across Guidewire projects supporting Core Systems (Policy, Claims, Billing, Digital, Rating, Forms Generation etc.) with various lines of Insurance businesses including Personal and Commercial lines, BOP, Renters, WC, LRP, GL to redefine and revamp the test automation frameworks utilizing the Behaviour- driven development approach including Application, API and UI Testing. This Team aims to work and deliver a powerful, reusable and robust test automation strategy providing speed, optimization and quality leading to ROI and Customer Satisfaction.

QA Automation

What is BDD?

BDD is Behaviour- driven development which is an Agile Software Development methodology focussing on the end-user’s perspective. BDD encourages collaboration among three Amigos of the Agile Team – Business Analysts, Developers and Quality Analysts to identify required system behaviors using a common language (Given-When-Then format) to create concrete examples of the system. BDD helps to build a shared understanding of the system among the team members brining efficiency gains and robust testing protocol by using acceptance tests.

With BDD, system behaviors are identified first and then test automated specifications are written by the team.

Behavior-Driven Development Testing Cycle

BDD centralizes attention to the system behaviors that need to be implemented along with those which will deliver most business value using Cucumber as the software tool and Gherkin as our scripting language enabling test automation. The GW testing Framework uses the Gherkin scenarios which are actually live requirements in a feature file for automated testing.

BDD methodology helps ensure that quality and testing do not come last in the project implementation rather it helps quality shift left and being built into every step of the development process and establishes a clear understanding of the system behaviors since the beginning of the project within the Agile Team.

Behaviour- driven development helps:

  1. To improve understanding of the requirements and lessens rework of requirements by using a common language with system behavior as the focal point and not system solution.
  2. The core attention to business needs reduces the rework and documenting behaviors provide longer shelf life than the implementation itself.
  3. Team collaboration increases with BDD which is a crucial key to successful BDD implementation along with enhanced developer confidence.
  4. The whole structure in-turn leads to higher Productivity Gains, Cost Effectiveness and drives Business Benefits with emphasis on behaviors with Business Value and prioritizing implementation of most valuable features.

The Team at Stratus is well-versed and experienced to use the Guidewire Testing (GT) Framework which simplifies testing and enabling BDD. We understand that it is mandatory for the Cloud Customers to follow Cloud Standards and the GW Testing framework be used and our Team has all the in-house capabilities to offer these advanced Quality Analysis services for Guidewire Cloud Platform with our enhanced competency and proficiency with GT-API and GT-UI which are functional automation tools available only on Guidewire Cloud Releases.

Functional Automation

The utilization of Guidewire Testing Framework ensures:

  1. Early defect detection bringing value to the overall product implementation and saving time later in the release
  2. Swift feedback on changes
  3. Better collaboration between Business and Technical users to enable fast implementations, releases and updates
  4. Common Testing Infrastructure with industry standard test automation tools – built on widely used open source and frameworks and tools
  5. Enables E2E testing of Guidewire APIs and for UI testing of GW Applications

We have currently automated approx. 180+ test scenarios with BDD framework across PolicyCenter, ClaimCenter and BillingCenter covering Account creation, Quote creation, Policy Creation, Policy Change transactions, Cancellations, Renewals (Manual and Time Travel), Out of Sequence transactions, Rescind & Reinstatements, Rewrite New Term, Rewrite Mid Term and Rewrite Full Term, Forms and Document validations in PolicyCenter. Policy Search & retrieval, Existing claim details updating, FNOL – New Claim creation and Documents generation validation in ClaimCenter. Policy Search & retrieval, Invoice validations, Policy related details validations, Disbursements, Part Payments and Workflows/Batch job runs in BillingCenter. This also includes Rest API and Guidewire internal APIs testing. The team also has developed BDD framework to test and validate XML files and Flat Files with the Guidewire Applications.

Reference:

Education.Guidewire.com- Behavior-Driven Development at Guidewire

Education.Guidewire.com – Guidewire Testing Framework Overview