OpenText and DXC Technology cut time-to-value for a major insurance company with an automated testing solution for data migration to integrate a corporate acquisition

Products and services

Solution group

OpenText™ DevOps Cloud

Outcomes

Up to 100X the volume of policies tested per execution cycle
50X faster testing per policy
Helped ensure smooth migration for customers

Challenge

Execute the accurate, secure and compliant migration and transformation of complex policy data to ensure a smooth, timely corporate acquisition.

Speed of integration is a critical factor in delivering rapid value from a corporate acquisition. When a global insurance company acquired a bank’s life insurance business, it needed to transform the incoming data to fit its own schemas. With 719,000 policy records, each containing up to 40 fields, this was an enormous and highly complex project. Insurance policy data is often sensitive, so it was also necessary to impose access restrictions.

The insurer appointed DXC Technology as its strategic partner to execute a data migration and transformation program as part of its acquisition of the large life insurance business. Active in more than 70 countries, DXC Technology had both the scale and the skills to meet the insurer’s needs. Daniel Biondi, CTO, Australia and New Zealand at DXC Technology, says: “We worked with both companies to define the mapping between the source and target systems, and build the data-transformation rules. First, we needed to prove that the process would work, which meant testing a representative sample of around 10% of policies. Manual testing required around 30 minutes per policy: on that basis, we were never going to finish testing before the deadline.”

Working with OpenText and using OpenText Functional Testing helped us to meet our client’s tight timelines for testing the migrated and transformed data. We were able to meet the requirements around quality, speed and security, and ultimately our work contributed to a seamless migration for policyholders joining our client’s business.
Daniel Biondi
CTO, Australia and New Zealand, DXC Technology

Details

Overcoming complexity

DXC chose OpenText™ Functional Testing to accelerate the testing workstream. “The complexity of all the possible permutations of policy data is huge,” says Biondi. “Without automation, testing would have been slow and prone to error. This was about automation first, then manual as the fallback. We selected OpenText Functional Testing and engaged the OpenText Professional Services team to help us set up the required scripts and plan the testing regime.”

DXC divided the testing into three phases by product groups, and ran an iterative process of testing, finding errors, working with stakeholders to improve data quality, refine scripts, and then re-testing. Validations and checkpoints were built into the scripts to minimize manual effort. To simplify the management and use of the scripts, DXC used OpenText™ Application Quality Management as its single central repository—enabling all teams to access the scripts quickly and easily. For compliance with data protection and security standards, the populated test results—output as spreadsheet files—were delivered to a secure fileserver with a restricted userbase. As part of the testing, DXC also captured screenshots from OpenText Functional Testing to prove the validation of specified fields in the target applications.

“Each test run of transformed data through OpenText Functional Testing produced a color-coded spreadsheet for root-cause analysis confirming the pass or failed result, highlighting mismatches and discrepancies between source and target applications,” says Lyle Heckrath, Testing Lead—Insurance Industry, Australia and New Zealand at DXC Technology. “An execution cycle can range between 500 and 1000 records with up to 40 fields per record to be validated, which results in a total of up to 40,000 validations. Based on the output, we determined the cause of failure and worked with the relevant teams to resolve that issue.”

In addition to increasing testing volumes by up to a factor of 100, OpenText Functional Testing enabled us to follow an iterative process.
Lyle Heckrath
Testing Lead, Insurance Industry, Australia and New Zealand, DXC Technology

Major gains in speed and quality

DXC successfully tested the migrated data across a representational sample of around 10% of the 719,000 records within the tight deadline required by the client. Testing automation significantly increased the volume of records that could be tested, from five policies per execution to between 100 and 500. Automated testing is much faster than manual testing, so DXC was able to execute testing on 100 records per hour versus two records per hour previously. In addition, the ability to execute multiple scripts simultaneously enabled an increased volume of testing with the same headcount. Equally, the same tester could be assigned to multiple streams, mitigating the risk of delays.

“In addition to increasing testing volumes by up to a factor of 100, OpenText Functional Testing enabled us to follow an iterative process,” says Heckrath. “The real value of automation is to simplify and accelerate testing iterations.”

Automation also contributed to higher quality through increased volumes. “With OpenText Functional Testing, we were able to build validations to test a given set of records whether it was a small sample or a large volume. Moreover, we went one step further and provided screenshots of the results in accordance with regulatory compliance and security to give the client peace of mind,” adds Biondi.

For DXC, the use of OpenText Functional Testing and OpenText Application Quality Management resulted in significant cost reductions, both from the reduced need to engage manual testers and the ability to reuse testing scripts. The reusability of scripts also cut the time required for test preparation, enabling greater focus on execution. Based on its experience on this project, DXC now has a best-practice framework for rapidly executing similar projects for other clients facing large data transformation and migration challenges.

“Working with OpenText and using OpenText Functional Testing helped us to meet our client’s tight timelines for testing the migrated and transformed data,” says Biondi. “We were able to meet the requirements around quality, speed and security, and ultimately our work contributed to a seamless migration for policyholders joining our client’s business.”

About Global Insurance Company

This multi-line insurance provider has a truly global presence, serving individuals, SMEs and large enterprises in more than 200 countries and territories with life and general insurance products.