McM
Case Study
Amongst other things, TestBench has enabled McM Corporation to reduce the amount of time spent performing unit and regression testing to make the quality assurance phase of application development much more manageable.
Our client
McM part of the IAT Group, is the holding company for property/casualty insurers Occidental Fire & Casualty Company of North Carolina, Wilshire Insurance Company, Acceptance Casualty, and Acceptance Indemnity. The companies offer non-standard personal auto insurance to higher-risk drivers and commercial vehicle coverage to the trucking industry, including cargo, liability, and physical damage coverage. Its products are sold through a network of independent agents in about 20 states.
Why they came to us
When McM's IT department was tasked with converting all of its insurance companies to POINT®, one of Computer Science Corporation's (CSC) property and casualty insurance processing solutions, Janet Reed, McM's Business Systems Manager, realized that taking short cuts was not an option. The company would have to ensure that the system was tested thoroughly throughout the conversion process but within the available time constraints.
In short, they would have to automate their testing processes to save time and still improve the quality of the testing.
What we did
McM found their answer in Original Software's TestBench for iSeries. TestBench is an iSeries server-based test engine used for scrutinizing interactive, batch, and service programs. It can check these programs for database access, rules, job log parameters, data area program calls, and I/O handling like screens and reports.
McM's IT Analysts used TestBench to quickly regression-test the code changes that were made by the third party vendor. The number of man-hours spent testing all of the facets of an application dramatically lowered compared to previous manual techniques. Also, because the test cases and scripts were standardized, new code could be tested more frequently throughout the development process.
TestBench was also used for testing and implementing McM's disaster recovery plan. McM programmers selected a production cycle that had already occurred, and saved the file statistics before and after the cycle for that date to a library for later comparison with TestBench. A disaster was then simulated by retrieving and loading a backup of the data and run and run the cycle to see if the results were the same.
Roxanna Bedor, an McM programmer comments, "We are able to save many precious hours with TestBench over the alternative, which involves analysts manually comparing to see if there are any differences.
How it worked out
Overall, TestBench has enabled McM Corporation to reduce the amount of time spent performing unit and regression testing. At the same time, they are increasing the breadth of tests that can be done under given time constraints, to make the quality assurance phase of application development much more manageable.
TestBench is a great time-saver. It is less human resource intensive, and increases the thoroughness of the testing."
Janet Reed, Business Systems Manager
