Healthcare Giant Accelerates Mobile Test Automation with InfoStretch and Perfecto

One of America’s largest healthcare organizations, serving nearly 10 million members, expanded its mobile capabilities to meet the demands of consumers who are increasingly in control of their healthcare decisions. The overarching goal with this provider was to use mobile apps and services to improve how its customers book appointments, view medical records, communicate with doctors, make pharmacy orders and more.

But in expanding its mobile app capabilities, the company recognized the need to improve their mobile development and QA process and tackle specific challenges.

Strategy Details

  • Participation in vendor workshop sessions as part of the technology selection.
  • Decided on a “Lead with Automation” initiative across multiple scrum teams for the implementation of continuous integration/continuous development processes.
  • Foundation was created for a scalable automation framework that would grow with the organization’s mobile app business.
  • Defined best practices for teams for deploying Perfecto’s cloud, utilizing test frameworks and streamlining the integration.
  • Instructed the company on how to reduce smoke test time to one day.

The Challenge

The key challenges the healthcare provider needed to overcome were slow release cycles and slow feedback to developers. Testing duration was a real hurdle because the testing process was mostly manual. App updates were simply taking too long relative to the demands of healthcare customers and the mobile market because:

  • A growing set of mobile app features resulted in longer and longer manual test cycles.
  • It was getting expensive to manually execute a constantly increasing set of tests. 
  • Not enough automation.

The company concluded that the key area to focus on was to increase automation. It turned to InfoStretch based on its experience in mobile development and QA to lead the automation strategy, along with InfoStretch’s close partner Perfecto to deliver the cloud-based lab.

The Solution

InfoStretch executed a three-part action plan:

  1. Build an Appium automation framework utilizing Perfecto’s flexible open source support.
  2. Apply InfoStretch’s expertise in automation to jump-start automating test scripts.
  3. Integrate functional testing into the Jenkins CI (continuous integration) pipeline, executing tests in parallel using Perfecto’s 24x7 cloud based lab, to improve speed and efficiency.

The Results

The InfoStretch/Perfecto implementation allowed the company to test apps on real devices under real user environments and automate tests running in parallel on multiple platforms, resulting in significant efficiencies.

Most notably—Operational savings of over $1.3 million in year one from reduced manual testing costs.

Other testing efficiencies resulting from the InfoStretch/Perfecto partnership:

  • Automated 400+ test cases in 12 weeks for apps across iOS and Android platforms.
  • 1,300 test cases were automated in year one, an increase of 325%.
  • The company is now automating 65% of all regression testing. 
  • Reduced the time it takes to complete automation executions to five to eight minutes per test case -- a reduction of 21%. 
  • Reduced average smoke testing time from one week to six hours.
  • Made full use of automation scripts in regular release cycles; the team automates 1,300 test cases out of a total of 1,700 and executes those tests 2-3 times per week.
  • Gained a total of 50 weeks in time-to-market for the development teams since implementing the joint InfoStretch/Perfecto solution.