Digital Transformation Driven by Open Source: Major US Insurance Company Shifts Quality to the Left

ABOUT THE COMPANY

A Fortune 100 insurance and financial services company is undergoing a highly successful digital transformation initiative. The company spends over $1 billion (USD) on IT every year, of which around $500 million (USD) is allocated to technology-enabled transformation programs. It has approximately 6,000 employees and contractors writing complex code on a daily basis. One of the largest and most respected insurance companies in the United States is undergoing As part of a major enterprise-wide digital transformation project, the organization is optimizing the way they do software testing to achieve quality with speed. This means shifting testing to the left—so testing is primarily done by the Agile teams as part of the application development process.

“When we were moving to the new tool, we knew we’d need a strong partner on the vendor side. We definitely found that with the BlazeMeter team”

Director of QA

THE CHALLENGE

ACHIEVE QUALITY WITH SPEED

Before the digital transformation project, the company had a traditional CoE model where testing was a centralized function. This model often caused bottlenecks when delivering new software to market. In the new model, the traditional QA team functions as consultants, helping the Agile application teams optimize application quality and performance throughout the software delivery lifecycle. “Without a change in how we did testing, there was no way test cycles could keep pace with the Agile teams,” explained a team lead.

THE SOLUTION

THE RIGHT TOOLING DRIVES ADOPTION BY AGILE TEAMS

To Shift-Left, the QA team knew they needed a testing platform the Agile teams would embrace. While the QA team had used LoadRunner in the traditional CoE model, LoadRunner lacks developer-friendly features and would not work for Agile teams. Open source is widely adopted throughout the CI/CD toolchain, so the QA team looked for tooling that would support open source and “as code,” with enterprise scale, reliability, and features. To find the new system, the company did an extensive, objective request for information. There was a very detailed scoring system. In the end, the BlazeMeter® Continuous Testing Platform was chosen.

THE BENEFIT

A UNIQUE APPROACH: CULTURE SHIFT IS KEY TO SUCCESS

Agile teams are able to use the open-source tools they prefer, in a scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready platform. All teams are onboarded, enabled, and using the BlazeMeter® Continuous Testing Platform ahead of schedule.

The BlazeMeter Continuous Testing Platform provides an enterprise-ready platform that allows users to easily automate and scale tests with their favorite open source testing tools. The BlazeMeter Continuous Testing Platform runs over 20 open source tools including JMeter, Gatling, Selenium, Locust, and more.

But choosing an application built on open source was just part of the equation to drive developer adoption. The team knew that culture transformation is always a barrier, so they initiated a creative way to drive adoption.

“We used gamification,” explained one decision-maker. They built a shared leaderboard and awarded points to application team members for using, collaborating, and knowledge sharing with the new testing tool.

“We wanted to prioritize scripting natively within the tool, so users got one level of points for converting a script using the LoadRunner to JMeter script converter developed by the BlazeMeter team, and more points for creating a new script. If you were able to take several old scripts and consolidate them into a single script in the new tool, you got bonus points for that as well,” he explained. This improved efficiency while users learned the tool.

Documenting a best practice earned points, and users received extra points for collaborating with someone else or presenting to the team with a real-life example. The process worked so well, teams were fully enabled on the open-source framework, transitioned to the new tool, and the application conversion goals were achieved ahead of schedule. The process also created an atmosphere of fun around the project.

“We are in a team that loves games. Just four months in, we had a full knowledge base and the teams were actively using the tool,” said a team lead.

The BlazeMeter team was a trusted partner throughout the process. When the team had enhancement requests or training needs, BlazeMeter was there to assist. The BlazeMeter team has also provided extensive training and consulting around open source testing and Shift-Left best practices. The Director of QA said the partnership was a major factor in the success of the project.

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