The insurance industry is evolving rapidly, and keeping up with scaling business needs requires smarter, more efficient approaches to testing. Adaptive sprint automation is a critical approach for insurers looking to enhance their agility without sacrificing the quality of their outcomes.
Improved testing capabilities are becoming pivotal for carriers to be able to deliver consistent, high-quality products and services to their customers. Customer-centricity, speed, and flexibility are critical capabilities for staying competitive in insurance, especially when it comes to product development and claims management.
By seamlessly integrating end-to-end automation into the sprint cycle, the adaptive sprint automation approach aligns testing with development, creating faster feedback loops and ensuring new features are validated from day one.
Why Adaptive Sprint Automation?
Unlike traditional testing methods, which often occur a full release after development, this approach uses test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD) methodologies to design and execute tests alongside code creation. Taking this approach empowers insurers to modernize their testing processes by addressing critical pain points and enhancing efficiency and quality.
It provides more streamlined, consistent testing across lines of business and cuts down on manual testing efforts for functional, API, and data testing. By bringing testing into the same time frame as development, teams using adaptive sprint automation are promoting collaboration between developers and testers as well as ensuring that testing is aligned with business requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria. This collaboration and alignment improves both test coverage and product reliability.
Automating test data generation and management ensures consistent and accurate data across sprints, which reduces manual effort and accelerates testing cycles. In addition, automated data validation tools integrated into the sprint cycle provide continuous quality checks. Building in these uniform quality checks throughout the sprint life cycle reduces defects, stabilizes releases, and supports high-quality outcomes.
By addressing these critical areas, adaptive sprint automation not only optimizes testing processes, but also positions insurers to adapt faster and compete more effectively.
How 3 Insurers Leveraged Adaptive Sprint Automation
Part of what makes adaptive sprint automation such a useful approach is that this method enables insurers to execute a wide range of technology efforts, from run projects and growth activities to transformation initiatives.
The real-time feedback loop enables continuous improvements to be made to the workflows powering daily business operations, while new features or products can be launched with minimal delays and in accordance with consistent quality standards across all parts of the organization. When it is time to modernize a core platform or integrate with a new partner platform, the same approach can be used to expedite the implementation life cycle while continuously testing to ensure the final solution delivers the capabilities needed to meet business goals.
Successful implementation of adaptive sprint automation requires more than just adopting tools; it involves strategic planning, alignment with development processes, and a commitment to continuous improvement.
Here is how three insurers that worked with ValueMomentum leveraged adaptive sprint automation:
- Improved Enterprise Quality Standards. A century-old commercial insurer wanted to enhance its reporting and governance practices to close quality gaps and deliver a consistent experience for employees and policyholders alike. The insurer was dealing with a mix of disparate frameworks and tools, low regression coverage and productivity when it came to testing, inconsistencies across reporting and limited insights from its quality assurance (QA) practices, and a lack of structured governance practices and reporting metrics.
The insurer worked with ValueMomentum to establish an enterprise quality engineering framework, centered around a Testing Center of Enablement with a scalable managed services model. The framework also built in standardized automation tooling and reporting, with audits to determine where quality gaps existed. With these adjustments and an adaptive sprint automation approach, the insurer saw a 25% reduction in its overall QA spend, a 70% faster execution cycle, and a 30% improvement in test throughput. In addition, 98% of the insurer’s defects are now contained pre-production.
- Enhanced Product Development Cycle. A top five auto insurer sought to improve its data flow across multiple applications to ensure the highest product quality and accelerate its speed to market. To achieve this, the carrier partnered with ValueMomentum to fully automate its testing in order to rapidly generate feedback for its developers through regression testing and continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipelines across all of the organizations’ applications.
By adopting these upgrades and using an adaptive sprint automation approach, the insurer was able to speed up its update cycle, increase its continuous integration and continuous testing pass rate, and lower the time and resources required for supporting its test execution to keep business running at the necessary pace. All of these factors led to faster and higher-quality product development and releases.
- Augmented Delivery Framework. A large personal and commercial lines insurer was looking to gain more operational efficiency and boost its business agility by finding an IT managed services partner that could support over 100 applications. The carrier needed to prioritize agility across cloud and hybrid environments while ensuring that security and compliance were not compromised.
To achieve these goals on an ongoing basis, ValueMomentum proposed implementing an AI-fueled, outcome-driven delivery framework. By leveraging hyper-specialized tools, self-healing applications, and an adaptive sprint automation approach to scale testing, the organization could realize as much as four times faster delivery, reduce operational costs approximately 10% year over year, and automate sprint testing for all Agile projects within the next 3-5 years.
Whether it is used to optimize the operations that keep the business running, fuel the enhancements needed to power growth, or fully transform an organization’s architecture, adaptive sprint automation can help insurers accelerate their business results. Incorporating testing into workflows early and often helps enhance collaboration across the organization and deliver high-quality experiences more efficiently.
Becoming Agile Testers
By integrating automation seamlessly into each sprint, insurers can streamline testing, reduce manual effort, and achieve faster, more reliable releases. Adaptive sprint automation ensures testing evolves in real time alongside development, fostering collaboration, enhancing coverage, and delivering consistent quality.
In a competitive industry where speed and scalability are paramount, adaptive sprint automation is an essential approach.
Interested in learning more about test automation? Read our whitepaper “Project to Product: Quality Engineering.”
