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North Carolina Department of Health & Human Service

How North Carolina Department of Health & Human Services transformed their test automation strategy with Tricentis Tosca

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tests automated with Tricentis Tosca

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reduction in regression testing time

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hours saved per release

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Company overview

North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services manages the delivery of health and human-related services for all North Carolinians, particularly children, elderly, disabled and low-income families. Working closely with health care professionals, community leaders and advocacy groups, as well as local, state, and federal entities, the Department includes 33 offices and divisions across the state.

With the Medicaid Transformation in 2021, the Department faced a steep challenge: transitioning most of North Carolina’s Medicaid services for about 1.6 million adults and children into a Managed Care model within the Department’s system. The North Carolina Families Accessing Services through Technology (NC FAST) office, a division within the larger Department of Health and Human Services, was tasked specifically with managing the transformation to the online presence of the entire Medicaid program for the state.

North Carolina is the first state in the country to create a shared statewide technology infrastructure and coordinated community networks uniting health care and human services, enabling providers to connect North Carolinians to the resources they need to be healthy, safe and well. The program offers a wide range of services to citizens within the state, including food stamps, Medicare, various Medicaid programs, child welfare, services, childcare, cash assistance, special assistance, and more, all of which would be standardized through NC FAST’s web portal. To ensure a seamless, fast release of the web portal, the NC FAST team quickly realized they would need to modernize their approach to testing.

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    Industry: Government
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    Organization size: 18,000
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    Location: United States
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Modernizing testing to support agency transformation

The NC FAST team had previously automated some testing using an open-source tool, but because the tool required seasoned JavaScript developers, the team began to explore other options to meet increasingly fast-paced deadlines as the developer team within the Department released more and more features.

“We ran into problems where we couldn’t write new scripts fast enough. Developer teams were building new functionality and testers couldn’t test these fast enough or even maintain the old scripts fast enough with our open source and JavaScript framework,” reports Neil Watts, Automation Team Lead at NC FAST.

To support the Managed Care Launch (MCL) during their agency transformation, the team needed a way to quickly scale test automation across all the new and updated code, as well as regression testing for ongoing feature development.

Challenges

  • Major release of a new web portal increased testing scope quickly and significantly
  • Open source testing proved inefficient, making it difficult to match the pace of development
  • Required test script maintenance introduced bottlenecks to QA cycles

Speed injection with Tricentis Tosca

After implementing Tricentis Tosca, the team saw a near-immediate increase in test automation speed. Thanks to Tosca’s codeless approach, testers were able to quickly build new automation scripts for new features as they were developed and match the rapid pace that the development team had set.

Sarada Chilikuri, Assistant Testing Lead at NC FAST, estimates that in less than three years’ time, her team has automated nearly 3,000 tests using Tosca, including complex end-to-end scenarios that cover processes across multiple technologies. Many of these processes originate from their ERP system, IBM Cúram Business Application Suite, which has seen robust customization from the Department’s developer and QA teams to support the unique needs of each of the various Managed Care programs that can be accessed from the portal, including Food Services and EPI & Child Welfare Services, as well as the provider portal.

To maximize the initial value of the new test automation initiative, the team performed a risk-based test assessment to determine the highest-priority test cases to automate first. The team has since extended automation significantly, with the ultimate goal of reaching 95% test automation. For Chilikuri, the transition to no-code test automation was a welcome change that is saving the team 40+ hours per release cycle. The team tailors their test cycles closely alongside maintenance and the transition to Tosca’s test automation has increased their regression test speed, so now they can keep pace with more frequent releases, which occur about every three weeks.

As a next step, the team plans to implement a nightly regression test run as part of their CI/CD pipeline in TeamCity. Once this nightly patch is implemented, Chilikuri foresees an additional 50% reduction in regression testing time, allowing her team to spend more time focusing on strategy, including automating edge cases.

Results

  • 3,000 tests automated with Tricentis Tosca
  • 30% reduction in regression testing time
  • 40+ hours saved per release

Democratizing test automation

The testing team at NC FAST includes just under 80 people, similar numbers to the Dev team. Chilkuri reports that they were able to hire great automation engineers who had experience with Tosca but, more importantly, could scale nonskilled IT members in Tosca relatively quickly. Not everyone at NC FAST has touched Tosca, but the long-term vision is that everyone at NC FAST will eventually be able to use Tosca fluently.

A positive upside is that many folks at NCFAST are now interested in learning about automation and about Tosca. The fact that Tosca is such a friendly tool to non-developers has made many people interested in automation, particularly manual testers who now want to work with the automation team. The majority of Watts’ team members are now certified as Tosca Automation Engineers through the Tricentis Academy program.

According to Watts, the implementation of Tosca has circulated a wider interest among NC DHHS testers in adopting test automation fluency. As Chef Gusteau said in the popular Pixar film, Ratatouille, “Anyone can cook.” With Tosca, anyone can become an automation engineer.

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