Business Needs
The State of Massachusetts’ new Health Benefit exchange system, called Health Connector, allows for any citizen to easily shop, compare, and buy health insurance plans. The system is a web-based application that has an open enrollment periods which allows people to sign up and manage their various plan details.
The State required temporal testing to validate a myriad of application logic such as
- Enrollment Periods
- Premium Values
- Insurance Rates
- Campaigns
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- Policy Forms & Wording
- Plan Triggers
- Expiration Dates
- Questionnaires
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With the on-going maintenance and application upgrades the State of Massachusetts required testing of all existing logic. In addition, new functionality and application code was constantly being developed and thus needed exhaustive validating and testing before live release. The State needed a time travel solution that would significantly speed up temporal testing and verification in order to meet critical federal deadlines and their Agile schedule.
Solution
With open enrollment approaching, the Massachusetts team needed a solution that would enable expedited temporal testing of their application. After review, the State concluded TimeShiftX was the best time travel solution to meet their critical deadlines.
In the Health Connector (ACA) application, each enrollee proceeds through various stages filled with date and time logic. TimeShiftX empowered testers by giving them full control to time travel the entire application stack independently without admin involvement. In addition, the team was able to speedily run through simulations with instant time travel, thus meeting critical deadlines and Agile delivery dates.
Benefit
By using TimeShiftX, Massachusetts was able to instantly time travel the entire distributed environment without admin intervention. This significantly increased the testing cycle and ultimately allowed Massachusetts to meet project deadlines.
Without TimeShiftX, the team was resorting to a burdensome manual process involving authorization meetings, formal change requests, admin intervention, infrastructure repair, etc. for one clock change. This process would take days and required cross team coordination. By implementing TimeShiftX, this entire manual process was eliminated and the testers were given full power and control to safely time travel their environment.
Reduced Release Cycle
From a single click, the testers were able to time travel their entire environment using TimeShiftX without admin intervention. This allowed the QA team to run advanced simulations and quickly provide the results to the developers. This benefited the team by reducing the discovery, investigation, and resolution of date bugs throughout the codebase, thus streamlining and reducing the release cycle. By leveraging TimeShiftX, admins and developers were able to focus on core responsibilities, thus increasing overall productivity.
Integrated Time Travel Quickly
TimeShiftX was an easy & quick deployment throughout the environment. This allowed the infrastructure team to focus on core configuration and platform tasks. And because TimeShiftX uses “virtual times” that are plug-in-play, there is no custom configuration needed from the applications or databases. This allowed admins to be free of involvement and enabled the testing team uninhibited control of their time travel.
Complete Technology Compatibility
With the variety of software contained within the application stack, the Massachusetts team chose TimeShiftX to ensure complete compatibility for all their applications. TimeShiftX successfully synchronized and time travelled all applications and databases out of the box and from a single click.
Increased Testing Coverage & Efficiency
The States’ Health Connector app allows millions of citizens to enroll for government subsidized health insurance. Using TimeShiftX, the State was able to run complex date simulations to test every major, minor, and edge cases. This ability increased testing coverage as the team could run through full end-to-end cycles and test every future and past stage. Through secure and seamless time travel, TimeShiftX increased Massachusetts’ testing coverage and improved overall team efficiency while meeting their strict release schedule.
