Success Story Healthcare

Healthcare Company Accelerates Delivery of Cancer Treatments

This healthcare company researches, develops and delivers innovative cancer care technologies and solutions to its clinical partners around the globe to help them treat millions of patients each year.

As the company’s operations and offerings became more software-dependent, and its development efforts expanded, the company faced growing instability in its manual software testing efforts, creating critical time-to-market delays and costly operational inefficiencies.

  • Provider of cancer care technologies and solutions for 70+ years

    Provider of cancer care technologies and solutions for 70+ years

  • +10,000 employees across 70 locations

    +10,000 employees across 70 locations

  • Improving care for millions of cancer patients

    Improving care for millions of cancer patients

automates software testing

Apexon began working with the company in 2016 (for more than two years) alongside software testing solution provider Tricentis. Apexon was able to leverage its deep experience to expand the company’s quality engineering (QE) efforts and deliver end-to-end test automation capabilities across their diverse systems.

the Results

Key Outcomes

Faster Cycle Time
Faster Cycle
Time

Delivery of new digital cancer care services sooner

Higher Service Levels
Higher Service
Levels

Internal quality expectations were met, on time and more accurately

Increased Operational Efficiency
Increased Operational
Efficiency

Expanded test automation capabilities and reduced test cycles by 50% to overcome key operational challenges

Our methodology

how
we did it

Apexon works with companies across the digital lifecycle.

Go Digital
Go Digital

Accelerating the delivery of new digital initiatives with confidence

Be digital
Be digital

Creating the infrastructure and foundation to scale digital initiatives

Evolve Digital
Evolve Digital

Leveraging data and analytics to continuously improve digital delivery processes

Launch & Experiment optimize testing with integration

Automate & Accelerate integration and test automation

Be Intelligent & Autonomous

Launch & Experiment

Enable digital adoption in a quick, and agile mannertransform the patient experience

Apexon performed integration testing and built successful Salesforce integrations with SAP, ServiceMax and other common desktop applications.

Automate & Accelerate

Build digital infrastructure and foundation for enterprises to scaledigitization on patient Experience

Apexon and Tricentis were able to integrate QA more closely with development and expand the use of test automation as part of the software delivery pipeline.

Be Intelligent & Autonomous

Leverage data engineering to make strategic decisions and get digital right every time

Key test cases and prerequisites were identified and refined to minimize the need for manual intervention during the QA process thus achieving the end-to-end test automation.

The challenge
Problems scaling with complex software

The company’s operations and service offerings were becoming increasingly software-dependent and at the same time, the demand and complexity of its software delivery was growing.

This led to many challenges in its software testing efforts, causing time-to-market delays and operational inefficiencies.

With an expanding test footprint and more frequent release schedule, there were no established end-to-end regression testing scenarios before major releases.

Release cycles were being extended due to extensive manual testing. There were also production rollbacks due to undetected defects in the QA environment. On top of those challenges, the delivery team faced other testing inefficiencies:

Bad test data
Bad test data

Duplicate and incomplete test cases

Inefficient testing
Inefficient testing

Inability to reuse test scripts

Lack of integration and organization
Lack of integration and organization

Missing test data and not all data was integrated across systems

Lack of metrics
Lack of metrics

A lack of automated defect tracking and metrics

Cumbersome testing
Cumbersome testing

20 analysts spending 4+ months to test an upgrade

Inefficient management
Inefficient management

Compliance standards that were more difficult to manage, creating additional manual testing requirements

The company needed to find a way to improve the testing environment in order to accelerate cycle time and keep pace with the accelerated software delivery schedule.

The Solution

Optimizing testing with integration and automation

Apexon deployed a new continuous delivery and testing approach.

Leveraging Tricentis’ continuous testing platform as the foundation, Apexon was able to integrate quality engineering (QE) more closely with development and expand the use of test automation as part of the software delivery pipeline.

The outputs from this effort included:

Better data management

Better data management

Identification, refinement and management of key test cases and prerequisites.

API optimization

API optimization

REST API testing for both functionality and response times.

Faster testing

Faster testing

Agile testing comprised of two-week sprints.

Automation

Automation

In-sprint automated testing followed by regression/end-to-end testing.

Streamlined data

Streamlined data

Prerequisite data creation as part of the test case execution to minimize the need for manual intervention.

Integrations

Integrations

Integration testing and successful Salesforce integrations with SAP, ServiceMax and other common desktop applications.

The new QE environment also enabled faster, more continuous feedback on the quality of each release and the potential risks associated with it. Apexon leveraged its experience with key applications such as Salesforce and SAP to speed the company’s integrations and test automation efforts.

With end-to-end test automation scenarios in place across their various systems, cycle time and efficiencies dramatically increased, and the products were thoroughly tested before market release.