Summit Holdings
Case Study
Insurance company Summit Holdings has saved up to 75% of testing resource as a result of automating their testing, and achieved some of the industry's highest levels of customer service.
Our client
Workers' compensation insurance protects employees who are injured on the job by seeing that they get proper medical care. It helps employers to rehabilitate injured workers and get them back into the workforce. Summit Holding Southeast, Inc based in Lakeland, Florida, distributes workers' compensation insurance exclusively through independent agents and brokers, concentrating on small commercial and personal lines market.
Why they came to us
Summit has experienced rapid expansion in recent years and is now one of the largest workers' insurance providers in Florida.
Summit offers workers' compensation products to more than 30,000 businesses in nine states. This growth has put immense pressure on the company's infrastructure as more than 800 Summit workers have access to the iSeries model 835, either through green screens or a web based extranet, and several custom and internally maintained applications run on the iSeries machine also.
Controlling such a large share of business and balancing pressures on their software systems has necessitated the need to modify these systems. These modifications were estimated at 120 man-days, and 80 of those allocated to testing.
What we did
TestBench for iSeries from Original Software was chosen to automate unit and regression testing and improve internal processes. Mitch Raney, a Summit IT Analyst said:
Many of the options that we looked at were not specifically designed to run on the iSeries. They didn't have the ability to handle features that are unique to the iSeries like journals and job log information. We could have adapted them but we would have had to make several modifications to achieve the same results that you get with TestBench.
Summit technicians began using the automated testing solution, to unit and regression test new code. Testing man-hours plummeted along with allied administrative costs. According to Joe Summers, IT Development Manager, the amount of time needed to test the modified bill calculation program, dropped from four months to one. Mr Raney agrees,
It used to take a lot more time because we had to manually perform the tests. It was all interactive and we didn't have anything in place to do batch testing. With TestBench, you can push a button, and the user can go get a cup of coffee. In 15 minutes all the tests have run and you can go back and look at the results.
How it worked
Analysts, programmers, and testers at Summit now use TestBench for iSeries routinely and have reduced the amount of time spent testing software by 75%. Several projects lie ahead for Summit developers, and all of them, with the exception of those that involve only one day's work, include TestBench.
As far as testing goes, it's a miracle. The quality of our tests is very high - this could not be achieved without TestBench.