Case Study

Missouri uses TimeShiftX^® for Insurance project

The State of Missouri was creating a new web application for their Insurance system. Missouri used TimeShiftX to test the full lifecycle of benefits & claims. TimeShiftX enabled the State to gain full temporal testing coverage for all business cases and enabled them to run any simulation which was previously not possible due to Active Directory.

Business Needs

State of Missouri was creating a web-based, java insurance application. Their original software application was based on a legacy mainframe system. However, with the help of an I.T. consultancy, they migrated and upgraded the system to a new java, web-based distributed application on a mixed infrastructure inside their state data center.

The environment is contained within Active Directory and runs application servers and 3rd party databases on multiple platforms. The complexity of their environment paired with Active Directory blocking clock changes presented a serious challenge as the Missouri development team needed an easy solution to enable time travel.

Solution

With a deadline approaching, the Missouri development team needed a time shift software solution that was easy to use and integrate. The team decided TimeShiftX was the best solution on the market to meet their critical date testing requirements and provide the best test coverage.

In the project, each stage required data from the legacy system to be used to conduct a full lifecycle scenario of the benefits and claims. TimeShiftX gave testers full flexibility to time travel the entire application stack to the required past start dates, and run through entire business processes and test each business case until they reached future expiration. These date simulations increased testing coverage and improved QA efficiency as every business rule was now able to be completely temporal tested.

Benefit

By using TimeShiftX, Missouri and the I.T. consultant were able to instantly time travel the entire distributed environment, spanning multiple apps, and within Active Directory. This not only increased testing coverage, but enabled a complete end-to-end lifecycle test to be done on their claims & benefits workflow.

Without TimeShiftX, the development team would have needed to figure out how to remove Active Directory, thus breaking their test validity as their Test and Production environments match. By implementing TimeShiftX, the development team was able to utilize their current Test environment and date shift within Active Directory without any issues.

Integrated Time Travel Quickly

TimeShiftX was an easy & quick deployment throughout the environment. This allowed the infrastructure team to focus on important migration and configuration tasks. And because TimeShiftX uses “virtual times” that are plug-in-play, there is no custom configuration needed from the application stack. This allows application and database admins to be free of involvement and enables the testing team to have uninhibited control of their time travel.

Enabled Time Travel within Active Directory

Active Directory (like Kerberos and other domain security authentication protocols) has a security restriction where a time change of 5 minutes or more kicks servers off the domain and thus blocks time travel.

By using TimeShiftX, the Missouri team was able to completely remove this major roadblock as TimeShiftX allows time travel within Active Directory seamlessly. One consulting engineer said “Without TimeShiftX we would have not been able to run our date simulation tests and meet our deadlines.”

Total Application & Environment Compatibility

Given the variety of 3rd party software within the application stack, the Missouri team chose TimeShiftX to ensure complete compatibility for all their applications. TimeShiftX successfully synchronized and time shifted all applications and databases out of the box.

Synced Multi-OS Distributed Environments

One of the major requirements of the Missouri team was to time travel their distributed and multi-OS platform environment in a simple and manageable way. This was satisfied with TimeShiftX which allowed the Missouri testing team to have the ability to time travel and synchronize the entire distributed application from a single click.