The client is a large healthcare network operating across much of the U.S. Midwest. At the time of service, they were made up of 16 hospitals, 200 clinics, and over 2000 physicians and various staff. Across all locations, they accommodate multiple health concerns, such as emergency services, occupational health, internal medicine, and allergy services, to name only a few.
Their facilities offer a complete continuum of healthcare through acute and tertiary care hospitals, physician clinics, long-term care and assisted living facilities, home health agencies, hospices, and numerous other programs and services. While about 90% of the systems are considered generally similar at the different sites across the region, each location includes its own unique necessities and requirements.
The client was aware that utilizing test automation could substantially reduce testing costs over time. While implementing test automation requires a large investment, the end result is better coverage, increased ROI over time, higher efficiency and lower likelihood of disruptive human error.
Because the client had previously tried to implement test automation, a framework was already present and the process of creating automated test scripting had already been initiated. While they were not able to reach more than 20% coverage through their in-house teams, and despite having already exceeded the pre-defined budget for the entirety of the project, the client reached out for additional outside help from Qualitest’s automation experts.
Qualitest started the process with a test automation study that resulted in a designed test automation framework based on a wide variety of tools and techniques. First, Qualitest evaluated a few test automation tools to determine which would best suit the client’s needs. After choosing HP QTP as the main automation tool to be used, the QualiTest team was able to begin the testing and test automation process.
The next step was creating a set of virtualized test environments, part of which included test automation setup and tear down. Then Qualitest ran a full system breakdown, giving a detailed framework of all aspects of the system under test to aid both the development and testing teams. This enabled them to identify key features that were the most stable and “automation ready;” it was on these features that the automation effort would focus initially, as the more stable features offer a better foundation on which to build the test automation process. From there, a team of three test automation engineers created a small number of shared object repositories; these were created specifically to ease future automation processes which the company required. Finally, Qualitest used descriptive programming for hard-to-identify objects in the systems as well as for certain application dynamics.
