Importance of Testing
in the Insurance Industry

Insurers today face intense pressure from geopolitical and climate risks, regulatory compliance and competition. The last decade has witnessed the insurance industry undergo phenomenal digital transformation. This means insurance companies that were focused on products have had to start focusing on customer needs and customer experience.

From chatbots that provide instant customer support to automated claims processing systems that streamline operations, technology is at the forefront of transforming CX. These innovations offer significant benefits, including enhanced efficiency, reduced costs, and a more personalised customer experience.

insurance

APIs are crucial in digital transformation as they enable seamless integration of systems, enhance customer experience, foster partnerships and ecosystem growth by enabling third-party integrations, ensure security and compliance.

The insurance industry is complex with extensive integrations. It contains policy management systems, web, mobile apps, and embedded devices for telematics insurance with agent/broker facing and customer-facing apps. With such an intricate and massive system, having different quality assurance tools to test can cause fragmented, siloed, and incoherent testing processes, thereby slowing down testing velocity.

Furthermore, software testing for the insurance domain requires expertise in not just the enabling technologies and platform, but a deep understanding of the business flows, users and stakeholders.

One of the key characteristics of insurance is the complexity of business-logic – for example rating and premium calculation, and the different kinds of personas that must be served – e.g. product-owners, rating analysts, developers, underwriters and actuaries. Keeping up to date with industry regulations, staying on top of compliance and keeping the business profitable in a highly competitive environment is a stiff challenge.

Quality can refer to functional accuracy and the smoothness of the end-user experience. A lack of quality can impact the business in multiple ways. For example, if products are priced or quoted incorrectly, this affects the bottom-line. If policyholders are not shown contextually accurate data, the consequences can impact the brand or result in additional legal expenses. If quotes are not available to users immediately, they will promptly move on to other providers.

A good testing tool should enable the business, developers and QA to have a shared understanding, instead of having them work in silos.

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Download the Karate Labs guide to testing insurance software

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Karate for Guidewire Testing

After years of working in a variety of domains such as income tax and insurance, we observed common challenges and evolved patterns to address them.

Testing in the insurance domain is far more complex than the average e-commerce application.

Typical E-commerce

  • Simple custom-made UI
  • Minimal rules and validations
  • Simple payloads
  • Most use-cases done in one API call
  • Few external integrations
  • Most entities directly saved to database without transformation
  • Small object hierarchy
  • Flatter data model, few relationships
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Insurance

  • Metadata driven Ul
  • Complex rules and validations
  • Complex, nested payloads
  • Multiple API calls needed for core use-cases
  • Multiple back-ends and integrations
  • Significant back-end logic
  • Complex object and interface hierarchy
  • Deeply nested data model, many relationships

For such complex domains, the existing APIs may not be sufficient for testing deep backend logic. In many cases, APIs may not be available or enabled, take for example an insurer that is depending 100% on the web UI for serving users.

For teams that want to reap the benefits of API testing, we have a unique solution – which is to expose a special REST endpoint on the server under test. This endpoint is intended for use only in “development” or “pre-prod” mode and will not be available in a production deployment.

This REST endpoint will provide a flexible way to read and write data but honoring the contracts and business-rules. In other words, this is not a “brute-force” approach of using SQL on the database directly. This means that all customizations and configuration changes made to the base platform can be examined and exercised.

A visual representation of the Karate Labs solution is shown below.

  • Embedded into Server
  • Part of Platform REST framework
  • Low footprint, zero overhead
  • Return data from any entity
  • Call any server-side code
  • Re-use server-side helper utilities
  • Script complex data-set up or builders
  • Edit test without re-starting server
  • Edit test without re-compiling code
  • Full control like in Unit Tests
  • The developer experience of API Tests
  • Run on remote server, out-of-process
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This innovative solution combines the best of both worlds – the fine-grained control that one gets from Unit Testing – but with the out-of-process developer-experience of API Testing.

We know of many teams that must wait minutes and even hours for the server to rebuild after small changes to code. Since unit-tests run “in process”, the time taken to iterate while building a test is similar.

Most meaningful unit tests depend on a running database and back-end. Running a unit test means waiting for the whole cycle of starting the database and the server-side coming up. This is a huge productivity killer for teams that just want to write a comprehensive suite of tests.

The embedded adapter approach means:

  • The team can iterate on writing complex functional tests without having to restart the server for every small change made in the test script.
  • Data can be set up in any combination needed, along with currency amounts and numbers in true data-driven fashion.


Key highlights of the Karate Labs adapter for Guidewire testing:

  • Small footprint, embedded in server
  • One-time, simple install
  • Prepare and send data as JSON
  • Control Gosu using JavaScript
  • Invoke custom LOB code
  • Access to all entities / database
  • Edit tests without restarting server
  • Migration path to cloud
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Karate is a core technology for API testing that Guidewire embeds into the GT: Framework and is a proven solution for API testing in the P&C insurance industry.

Karate Labs is the sole Guidewire technology partner for testing technologies.

Please contact us at info@karatelabs.io to schedule a demo of Karate for Guidewire testing.