How SAGA eased into Agile software testing and increased capacity threefold

Digital transformation is at the heart of Saga’s growth strategy. In 2016, the company began moving its insurance operations onto the Guidewire platform. Consisting of both internal agent-facing and external customer-facing interfaces, Guidewire brings Saga’s critical business processes onto a single platform. “Guidewire is central to our whole insurance operation,” says Steve Johnson, Lead QA Engineer at Saga. “All of our policies and accounts run through Guidewire, so it’s critical that all processes and scenarios are running smoothly, which requires ongoing development and testing.”

That puts a lot of responsibility on Johnson and his large team of QA testers. It’s up to them to ensure each and every new Guidewire development release is in optimal operational order. And the workload is heavy with one monthly development release for each of Saga’s two lead products — motor and home insurance. Meeting that need meant solely manual testing was no longer feasible under the new Agile methodology. Therefore, the company turned to Katalon’s quality management platform to enable more agile software testing.

Johnson says Katalon has increased operational efficiencies with more agile software testing and faster testing timelines. And the fact that the Katalon quality management platform enables his team to test more scenarios in each four-week sprint is improving software quality.

“With Katalon, we can run a huge number of tests in a relatively short space of time. At the moment we’re running at least 100 scenarios per product, per development release with Katalon. When regression testing was manual, we would have only been able to test around 30 scenarios across two days. The Katalon testing platform has more than tripled our testing capacity, and reduced this process from two days to two hours.”

Katalon’s quality management platform is also having a positive impact on the QA team. It has significantly reduced the need for overtime work — and the associated costs. And since Katalon also offers an intuitive, easy-to-learn low-code test automation experience for beginners (in addition to infinite testing extension for experts), Johnson can enable and empower a broader set of testers to contribute to Saga's software quality efforts.