Challenge:
Kaiser Permanente had 8 weeks until the October 2012 open enrollment period and needed to test 2,000 scenarios against their latest billing software enhancement. Historically, the in-house development team could only test a maximum of 400 scenarios in 6 weeks. AlignStra was commissioned by Kaiser Permanente to create a system that could test the 2,000 scenarios within the 8 week deadline, so they could start accepting new Medicare customers.
Background:
Kaiser made a $20 million billing software enhancement to accept 1 million new Medicare patients and manage $12 billion in upcoming revenue. The software combined customer service management, premium bill collection, claim management, service provider portals, and financial reconciliation tools.
The 2000 scenarios were written to test 500 unique plan combinations against 4 software functions. The enrollment plan stratification included income, location, previous medical history, and desired co-pay. The software functions included enrollment, eligibility verification, plan selection, and premium billing.
Previous project managers and testing teams could never finish their sprints in time, causing detrimental delays in patient enrollment, premium collection, and customer service. The traditional system required all 50 testers on the team to test the 4 functions nonconsecutively. They needed to wait for the completion of all function tests to discover and report bugs. Then the developers would get overloaded with fix requirements, and the testing would need to be started all over again.
Solution:
AlignStra developed a business simulation strategy for successive scenario testing. The 50 testers were split into 4 teams and assigned functions. The first team worked specifically on the first functionality of enrollment. If the function passed, it would be sent to the second and third teams for remaining functions. Each team had a continuous pipeline of tests to run, and received outputs as needed. If any team found bugs, the scenario would get passed back to the original team for fixing and new testing. By using a round-robin system, the cases that moved forward were tested consecutively, and the errors were fixed in real-time by the development team.
Results:
The team was able to finish testing the 2,000 scenarios in 4.5 weeks and completed two full rounds of testing before the open enrollment deadline. Code problems were discovered much earlier, and the developers could install solutions while they were simultaneously testing other functions. John Smith, VP Engineering, Kaiser claimed “We are very happy with AlignStra’s strategy. This new system for testing was a life saver, and will be used for future software enhancement testing.”
To have AlignStra solve your software development challenges, contact info@alignstra.com