ORIX Life Insurance Corporation
Adopting UFT One to drive companywide test automation and accelerate development of competitive insurance products
Products and services
Outcomes
- Shorten regression tests from one hour per system to 10 minutes or less
- Automate data-driven tests, e.g., insurance premiums calculation, and standardize them across all departments
- Produce higher quality products and applications
- Prevent test failures and rework caused by human error
- Focus on improving developers’ productivity for higher value work
Challenge
“CURE Next“, one of ORIX Life Insurance’s main products, is a popular medical insurance product that offers generous coverage with respect to seven major lifestyle related diseases. The company, which quickly saw the need for medical insurance, has steadily grown its business, reaching more than 4.8 million personal insurance policies by the end of 2021, and thus has a strong presence within the ORIX Group.
The most significant outcome is the increased developer productivity. Most importantly, developers are now able to focus on higher value tasks, leaving the automation to UFT One. Test automation has eliminated degradation and led to improved application quality.
Yasuhiro Matsui, Testing CoE Leader, and member of the IT Product Management Department, shared: “Competition in the mark et for insurance products targeting individuals, including medical insurance, is getting fiercer. Insurance products designed to meet customer needs are diversifying, and the cycle for developing new products, renewing existing products, and revising insurance premiums, etc., is accelerating. More efficient and faster application development, while maintaining and enhancing the quality of systems and applications that support insurance business, is an urgent matter.”
The life insurance business mainly comprises recruitment, application, acceptance, assessment, maintenance, and insurance premium payment phases, and ORIX Life Insurance has developed, and operates around 50 systems that support each of these phases. The company releases new products every 6 months but is planning to shorten this cycle.
“We established a new IT Product Management Department in April 2022 and transitioned to an organizational structure that supports the application development and operations, and IT infrastructure operations, which had been vertically siloed and integrated. Prior to this, we formed a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) to oversee the standardization of cross-group test environments, and review test processes that generate large workloads and costs,” says Yasuhiro Matsui.
Insurance premium calculation, which involves large and complex data patterns of each type of insurance product, is a representative example of an area where mistakes due to system errors are absolutely not allowed. Since multistep tests and validation tasks are essential during application development and improvement, these increase test workload and costs.
“The fact that developers were also responsible for testing processes and that a lot of manual work remained was also an issue. At the same time, we were seeing production incidents indicating that application quality was declining. So, to eliminate these issues, we established the policy to separate development and testing from test automation. And after a deeper analysis, we adopted OpenText UFT One as our functional test automation tool,” says Yasuhiro Matsui.
Details
Solution
Promoting Test Automation across the Board
UFT One is a functional test automation solution with an extensive and successful track record. The Testing CoE, lead by Yasuhiro Matsui, has taken the lead for implementing test automation and test process standardization based on UFT One, and promoting its use via in-house workshops and creating user manuals.
In looking back, Yasuhiro Matsui commented: “The ease with which UFT One performs data-driven tests allows us to support insurance premium calculations. Our choice for UFT One was further confirmed by its ability to execute automated tests via scheduling, and the breadth of its capabilities for performing GUI tests and API tests. It was also an advantage that our development partners, including offshore ones, are experienced with UFT One.’’
The IT Product Management Department focuses mainly on the planning and design stages of systems and application development projects and handles development phases in collaboration with their highly experienced partners. Under the organization’s structure, development partners are in charge of standalone tests, while the IT Product Management Department oversees integration, system, and acceptance tests.
“Our automated processes verify that insurance premiums are calculated correctly by UFT One data-driven tests. The procedures are simple and easy. First, test input values, such as age, gender, and plan, etc., prepared in Excel are read for UFT One, which then calculates insurance premiums while automatically manipulating application screens. Then insurance premiums calculated by UFT One are pushed back into Excel. It is now possible to check automatically whether they match expected result values, ‘’ says Yasuhiro Matsui.
UFT One automatically executes this process in tens of thousands of patterns, and automatically acquires screen captures that serve as proofs of the test outcomes. In the past developers, in charge of their tests, used other tools they selected themselves. However, many tests remained not performed from test design to execution including result screen captures, and they had to be executed manually. UFT One has dramatically changed the developers’ work by automating test processes.
“The automation of data-driven tests has delivered significant outcomes by allowing developers to leave test execution to UFT One; thus, freeing them to focus on higher value tasks. This has allowed us to substantially improve our development productivity, by, among other things, eliminating test failures and rework caused by human error. We use UFT One test automation as a standard and will gradually expand to other applications. As of August 2022, we automated at least 70% of our main application functional tests,” says Yasuhiro Matsui.
Automation of High-Frequency Regression Tests
Test automation via UFT One can be applied to various targets. ORIX Life Insurance has also started using UFT One for regression tests that were highly dependent on large numbers of manual tasks.
Risako Matsui, who is involved in application operations in the IT Product Management Department, shared: “We performed our original tests through keystrokes and manual inputs to see whether failures would occur in main system and application operations in conjunction with the application of updates, or security patches for server OSs, client OSs, web browsers, etc. These tests required around one hour per system but automating them using UFT One has enabled us to shorten success matching results to 10 minutes or less. Thanks to greater efficiency of test processes, we plan to expand our range of regression tests beyond the current 13 systems.”
ORIX Life Insurance has formulated master guidelines and is engaged in various efforts to maintain and enhance the quality of its services. Various tasks previously performed manually are gradually being transitioned to automated processes using UFT One.
”Customers and insurance agents begin using our systems from around 6:00 am. However, we have suffered failures at 6:00 am that prevented them from using the systems, and delayed detection and results because they occurred before most of our employees had arrived at work. As a temporary solution we use UFT One and we assigned members of the application operations team on a rotational basis, to confirm there is no functional problem when these services get started at 6:00 am.” says Risako Matsui.
Outcome
Higher Product Quality and Faster Development
Test automation based on UFT One has greatly contributed to improving application development and process efficiency. The organization expects to also improve the application quality as well as speed up application development.
“The most significant outcome is increased developer productivity. Most importantly, developers are now able to focus on higher value tasks, leaving the automation to UFT One. Test automation has eliminated degradation and led to improved application quality. Furthermore, separating development and tests implementing test automation has led to faster development,” says Yasuhiro Matsui.
- Enhanced developer productivity through test automation
- Improved quality, and faster application development through accurate and reliable tests
- Enhanced return on investment through promotion of use across teams
UFT One for API Testing
The Testing CoE now applies UFT One across a broader range of applications. UFT One, which has a successful track record in the enterprise sector, provides a wide set of functionalities to further enhance test automation outcomes.
As Testing CoE, we are making UFT One available throughout the testing process from upstream to downstream and helping as many developers as possible to take advantage of the rich set of functionalities that UFT One offers.
“An immediate new use case of UFT One is API testing. A typical example is a shared feature that searches policy details by policy number and activates APIs from multiple systems. Since APIs do not include GUIs (screens), dummy screens must be prepared for tests, which is inefficient when done on a project-by-project basis. The Testing CoE proposes the use of UFT One API test function as a standard across the entire IT Product Management Group and considers promoting it to eliminate duplicate and wasteful work,” says Yasuhiro Matsui.
“As the Testing CoE, we are making UFT One available throughout the testing process from upstream to downstream and helping as many developers as possible to take advantage of the rich set of functionalities that UFT One offers. Furthermore, we believe this will contribute to enhancing productivity across the entire IT Product Management Department, and to the development of more competitive insurance products. We expect that Micro Focus (now OpenText) will continuously communicate with us to share the latest technical information.” concluded Yasuhiro Matsui.
About ORIX Life Insurance Corporation
ORIX Life Insurance Corporation (ORIX Life Insur ance) was founded in 1991 as a member of the ORIX Group. The company offers insurance products through multiple sales channels, including agencies, bank counter sales, direct sales, and Web/mail order, and has developed and operates around 50 systems that provide the necessary functions for each of these channels. As the development of new products, renewal of existing products, and revisions of insurance premiums accelerate, the demand to develop various applications dedicated to insurance products increases. ORIX Life Insurance adopted the UFT One functional test automation solution with the goals of reducing the test workloads that encompass the bulk of application development and improvement processes, and of standardizing test environments and procedures.
