In today's world, insurance companies provide a variety of insurance options related to life, automobile, health, property, and casualty, with different types of coverage plans. Insurance companies are continuously looking for technical solutions to meet the demands of the customers and create products according to their needs.
Each technical solution needs to be tested thoroughly to be consistent and durable. Each insurance company uses various combinations of tools and technologies to maintain their software as these help them to improve customer satisfaction and reduce the cost to manage data. Insurance companies are also focusing on keeping their customer's data safe and secure. In the insurance domain, it is very crucial to keep the software and products up to date.
What is Insurance?
An insurance policy is a contract that exists between an insurance company and the individual or an organization seeking insurance. In this contract, the insurer agrees to take on the risk of the insured person against specified future events or losses. In return, the insured person provides regular payment to the insurance company.
Challenges Faced by Insurance Companies
The primary goal of the insurance domain is to provide financial protection to the consumers against uncertain losses. That’s why, insurance applications should have flawless functionality and the ability to perform tasks as soon as possible. So, what are the challenges faced by insurance companies when dealing with mobile applications? Let’s check them out:
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Data Security
Dealing with customer data is a critical matter, especially when you are dealing with insurance mobile applications. It is the responsibility of the companies to ensure full compliance of the insurance software with the Dodd-Frank Act and DOL fiduciary rule. To ensure that everything falls under the data protection act, penetrating testing is necessary. The QA teams have to analyze whether data and resources are protected from malicious attacks or not.
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Unexpected Performance Failure
Sometimes, companies skip the task of analyzing the application performance under heavy traffic and load. Hence, users may encounter performance issues when using insurance applications as it is not optimized to perform under heavy load. It can block functionality or force turn off the mobile. And nobody wants to experience such scenarios. That’s why load and performance testing is necessary when analyzing insurance applications.
Importance of Domain Knowledge
We must look for a team that has good domain experience in insurance testing when we are looking for migration of the QA team or to hire a new team. Below are the benefits of having an experienced QA team:
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Quick Turnaround on Training
A team with sound domain knowledge will learn the product comparatively quicker than a team with no experience. As a domain expert team will have all the knowledge of terminologies used in the application and the business workflows. This will help them in quicker learning of products and start on delivery as per expectations.
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Understanding of Back-end Processing
A team with existing experience in testing insurance applications will easily know how things are processed on the back-end. Here, the QA team will know if the outcome is not matching the expected, then which area is causing the problem. This will help quick rectification of the issue.
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Quick Tracking of Bugs
The team which knows all workflows easily catches the things which are not performing well. Knowing bugs early in the system gives us adequate time to fix things on time so that an end-user will not get affected by the same. An experienced QA team will be able to catch up to 98% of issues on the QA environment itself.
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Identify Missing Requirements
An experienced team will easily understand the new requirements of the system and help in identifying the missing areas on the initial level. This in turn will make requirements as a more trusted source of information for a product that is in development.
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Effective Test Planning and Implementation of QA Process
To make a product successful, the test plan should be well documented and planned. Good test plans help in effective communication which in turn leads to the success of the end product. This is where a domain expert team plays a vital role.
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Trusted Advice Providers
As QA folks work closely with the team, they are the right persons who can provide advice/feedback before end-users. Having an experienced domain expert team onboard results in trusted advice that will fetch the fruits on time.
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Implementation of Test Techniques
A domain expert team can opt for the best testing technique which suits the product and helps in testing requirements effectively. The effective technique will minimize the QA test case design and execution time.
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Setting up Priority of Issues
The domain expert team knows the business importance and number of users who are actively using the feature which will be affected by the issue. This will help in the prioritization of issues and get that fix accordingly.
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Closer Edge on User Experience
The QA team uses the system before customers and they can provide accurate feedback about the user experience of the product. Real-time human feedback is very important for the success of a product. Team with high domain experience understands customer behavior and helps in building the right product.
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Deliver More Accurate Product
A QA team with domain expertise will catch most of the issues in the QA environment and provide a sign-off for production release. This will lead to a production release without any defects. All bugs found in the QA environment lead to a successful product launch. This will increase the market value of the product.
Insurance Domain Application Tips
The insurance domain is so vast that building an application as per customer requirements is not an easy task. It consists of various processes and functionalities that adding everything into one application could be a hassle. And, it is the tester's job to make sure that the application meets the customer's needs. As per insurance software testing services below are some tips that testers need to follow while testing an insurance domain application.
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Integration of Modules
Insurance applications have four main modules like underwriting system, quote system, case management, and CRM integration. All these modules are dependent on each other. To make an application successful testers need to make sure that integration between these modules remains intact and there should be no data breach. Tester needs to make sure that if data is passed from one module it is well caught in the target module from where it is supposed to process meaningful information.
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Creation of Role Matrix
There are different actors involved which include in an end-to-end insurance process like underwriters, firm agents, brokers, and carriers. They are the people who use the system daily, hence they must access the application piece to which they are authorized. It is better to create a role matrix for permissions associated with each role. This will help in better test planning and coverage.
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Mathematical Calculations
In insurance applications, many fields are sensitive to numbers. A small change in these numbers can make a big difference in the premium amount. So testers need to check all fractional points and verify those fields at least once manually which are auto-calculated.
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Payment API Testing
The QA team must test all kinds of payments and their effect on payment structures for the remaining tenure. There are times when the user opts for quarterly or monthly payments then QA needs to make sure that payments are deducted with the correct amount from the user account. It is very critical that these things will work fine as customers are more sensitive where money is involved. This can be done using a dummy set of cards that will return each kind of status like success, error, failed.
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Reports Validation
In insurance applications, we need to share potential customer data across different vendors. Each vendor expects this data in the format their system will process data efficiently. Hence there is a need to export data through the system in the PDF, excel, word, or CSV formats which are commonly used. The QA team needs to make sure that there should be no data loss when the user is exporting the data.
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Business Perspective Test
To test an insurance application, end-to-end testers should have complete knowledge of business workflows. Testing engineers need to think from a firm agent, broker, or carrier perspective while validating their respective modules.
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Maintain Strong Regression Suites
Insurance applications need to deal with frequent changes. Hence it is important to maintain a regression suite that will be executed before every prod release. Execution of this suite will make sure that each existing module is working fine. If testers keep their regression suites up-to-date, this job will become easy.
Tools to Test Insurance Domain Application
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JMeter
Insurance domain applications have different checkpoints and complex validations. These are essential to test key areas like a quick quote, underwriting expert, and case management where maximum transactions are happening within the application. Performance around these areas is critical to test. JMeter is an open-source tool that can serve the purpose here. The QA team can simulate a heavy load on the application server to see how it will perform in peak times when the application traffic is high.
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SQL Server
Insurance applications have complex databases. It is very important to validate the output for queries run on these databases to give correct results as per expectations. Hence the QA team must be well versed with SQL server tools to perform database/back end testing.
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Selenium WebDriver/TestNG
Insurance applications are bound to have frequent changes to be compliant with government norms. It is very important to run regressions suites every time whenever there are new things to be released on production. To run a complete regression suite manually is a cumbersome task. There is where automation can help you. An automation framework with a combination of Selenium WebDriver and TestNG can serve this purpose.
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Postman
From shopping to food ordering, everything is online nowadays. Hence, insurance applications also follow the same approach. QA needs to test payments for new policies, firm registrations, and renewals. If we will leave these for production then this will cost a lot of money, since a fixed transaction charge will be applied to every transaction. Moreover, where money is involved, customers also become too sensitive. This is where API testing can help us.
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GhostLab
Insurance applications are supposed to work across all browsers and devices. It is very difficult for one member to have access to all devices and browsers. This is where tools like GhostLab help us to perform cross-browser as well as testing on different mobile devices. This will save a huge amount of infrastructure cost.
What's Next?
Need help testing an insurance application? Choose to partner with an experienced QA services provider like QASource. Our team of testing experts specializes in insurance domain testing. Our QA engineers can help your team adopt insurance domain testing best practices within your development cycle so that your software app launches to market successfully every time. Get in touch with a QASource expert now.
