A pre-existing Agile adopter, DentaQuest recently started working with NeoLoad after experiencing significant testing time delays and reporting inconsistencies under the previous performance testing solution. They will reaffirm that the NeoLoad decision was not an easy one. The team had wrestled with remaining incumbent-loyal vs. accepting bids from front-runners LoadRunner and NeoLoad.
Background:
DentaQuest is the second largest dental benefits administrator in the United States, and largest in the Medicaid space. With over 24 million members across the United States, the company is continually focused on providing its users with innovative solutions at lower costs. This includes a heavy concentration of digital engagement with members. One of the most important is their claim processing/call tracking application. How critical is the performance of this application, just ask Scott Schweitzer, SQA Supervisor,
“… an issue with the application could have a potentially significant impact on our ability to process claims, answer customer calls, or otherwise, provide optimal customer service in a timely manner. As an organization committed to service excellence, this would be unacceptable. We needed a better way to ensure this would not happen.”
Needless to say, this is the application the DentaQuest team performance tested using NeoLoad.
Testing Practices:
- In a typical scenario, DentaQuest performance tests are conducted in concert with their weekly release cadence.
- Tests last up to four hours, and will simulate greater than half of today’s 800 total peak users (w/peak duration lasting up to 2 hours).
- Test design requires sign-off by Performance Testing team.
- Success = similar performance to that of the most recent run. Anything less than this, sends them back to the drawing board.
With NeoLoad, DentaQuest needed to address its legacy tool’s key shortcomings:
- Controller/agent communication breakdowns.
- Tests time outs as soon as they were kicked off – resulting in repeated time-consuming attempts to execute.
- Script maintenance time ran long. At least once a month when scripts would be updated, DentaQuest experienced similar time delays.
- Report results varied. A significant issue for the DentaQuest team because they never felt confident whether spikes were real or fake. This also prevented the team from SLA establishment.
Results with NeoLoad (according to Isha Satija, Lead Performance Engineer, DentaQuest):
- “With our old tool, releases were sometimes pushed as we could not complete performance testing on-time. Now, we have performance testing complete even earlier then when manual testing is done…”
- “We’re seeing faster scripting, maintenance with correlation and extraction; reports are comprehensive and clearly pinpoint any issues.” This includes the comparison report view “allowing us to see builds side-by-side…”
DentaQuest estimates a “>50% faster run time using NeoLoad vs. the legacy solution. The team also feels very comfortable with their ability to easily scale with the projected growth volumes upwards of 20%. Most importantly, they have additional time to focus on other business initiatives they never thought possible. A “shift further left” state might be realized after all.
For the full DentaQuest story, visit the Neotys Resources page.