Swiss Life

Case study | Swiss Life
Challenge
Manual processes failing to cope with
testing volumes
If there is a company that knows a thing
or two about risk management and
pensions, it is Swiss Life. The 150-year old
business is a leading European provider of
life, pension and nancial solutions, with
around 7,000 employees, of which 4,600
are licensed nancial advisers. The quality
assurance of its software ensures risks are
kept to a minimum across this large and
complex organisation.
In extreme cases faulty software can lead
to incorrect insurance payments or incorrect
transaction processes. In order to ensure
such scenarios do not occur, the central test
centre for private pension provisions has
undergone a complete overhaul.
“It became clear that we’d only be able to
oer new functions and perfectly functioning
software if we automated a large proportion
of the regression tests,” says Elisabeth
Zimmermann, test team manager of the
Competence Center at Swiss Life. “This would
give us the freedom to bring new products to
market more quickly.”
Up until the reorganisation, two teams
of 15 employees were responsible for
testing private pension provisions. The
division would have to handle a total of six
releases per year, each with many changes.
On average, there are around 600 test cases
for new requirements alone.
A portion of the team was responsible for
manually carrying out the regression tests
and constantly found themselves falling
behind. There was often not enough time
to carry out all regression tests during the
system testing stage, with outstanding tests
having to be carried out during the functional
testing stage.
“This was a constant source of stress;
not only for the testers, but also for the
developers,” recalls Zimmermann. Software
errors were generally only discovered at a
very late stage, by which time the developers
had moved on to the next release.
When Swiss Life started to look for a test
automation tool, HP Business Process
Testing was one of only two available tools
evaluated, both being used in other areas
of the company. With HP Quality Center
already used as a standard solution for test
management at Swiss Life, the decision to
use the HP tool was a quick one.
“For us, it was important to be able to
integrate the entire test management
into HP Quality Center in the future,”
says Zimmermann.
HP Quality Center will now be used
exclusively at Swiss Life. “In terms of
consistent performance there is no
comparable tool on the market. We can
check the progress of each project with a
single click and HP Quality Center is helping
us to work more quickly and eciently,” says
Zimmermann. In addition, the requirements
recorded in the HP Project and Portfolio
Management Center (HP PPM) for new
software functionalities are seamlessly
integrated into HP Quality Center.
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