Alm. Brand Group is a Danish insurance group with a focus on non-life insurance. Together they are — with more than 700,000 customers — Denmark’s second largest non-life insurance company.
About the Company
Alm. Brand Group operates within the insurance industry, providing comprehensive insurance solutions to clients. Headquartered in Denmark, the company has established itself as a leading player in the market. With a commitment to excellence and innovation, Alm. Brand Group continually seeks ways to enhance its operations and better serve its customers.
The team at Alm. Brand Group is comprised of dedicated professionals who bring a wealth of expertise across this dynamic business. The QA team currently includes 11 professionals. Nicki Bang-Madsen, serving as the Test Lead Engineer, plays a pivotal role in setting the strategic direction for testing within the organization. Bo Ritzau Frydensberg, the Chief Product Officer (CPO) for CRM/Sales and customer engagement, sets the organization’s strategy regarding processes implemented on Salesforce and serves as the leader for the product owners working on Salesforce. Anita Vuong Nguyen, a student apprentice technical tester, specializes in the Salesforce domain, contributing to the company’s Salesforce initiatives. Camilla Victoria Tjærby, functioning as a Manual Tester and Business Developer, bridges the gap between testing and business development, ensuring alignment between technical requirements and business objectives. Søren Bolvig, Chapter Lead, leads those working on Salesforce and ensures the platform is in a healthy state.
For the past six years, Alm. Brand Group has been utilizing Provar Automation for Salesforce testing. This partnership has empowered the company to streamline its testing processes and achieve greater efficiency in delivering high-quality software solutions. Recently, they decided to incorporate Provar Automation into their strategy even further, enabling them to implement real end-to-end testing across their business.
“With our ongoing success with Provar Automation on our Salesforce platform over the last 5 years (where after the first year, we managed to reduce the cost of manual testing by 91%), we decided to try to make it the strategic tool for all platforms where it could be used.”
– Nicki Bang-Madsen, Test Lead Engineer, Alm. Brand Group
Before Provar
Before adopting Provar Automation, Alm. Brand Group faced significant challenges in testing due to the complexity of the insurance industry and the intricacies of merging two large insurance companies’ IT stacks during their large acquisition of Codan. This complexity was further compounded by the need to navigate multiple systems and integrations, including web applications, Oracle ADF for sales tools and archive systems, Salesforce CRM, Optimizely for CMS, and various internal and external databases and partner insights.
The landscape described presented several testing hurdles, including the need for comprehensive testing across different platforms, ensuring seamless integration between systems, and maintaining data integrity throughout the process. Manual testing, the primary method employed by the team before adopting Provar Automation, proved to be time-consuming and resource-intensive, with the company investing approximately 2000 hours in manual testing during system integration and UAT testing for a major release.
“On the first major release after the consolidation of our companies and implementing our new sales process, we ended up with around 2000 hours manual testing across our system integration and UAT testing processes. With the knowledge that we would have multiple similar releases coming over the next couple of years, we realized we had to make it easier, and based on our experience in Salesforce, we knew the power of investing correctly into test automation.”
– Nicki Bang-Madsen, Test Lead Engineer, Alm. Brand Group
Recognizing the need for a more efficient and cost-effective testing solution, Alm. Brand Group embarked on a search for a test automation solution. The company sought to reduce manual testing efforts, streamline testing processes, and mitigate the risks associated with complex system landscapes and frequent releases. After evaluating various options, Alm. Brand Group chose to leverage Provar’s expertise.
By implementing Provar Automation, Alm. Brand Group aimed to achieve significant cost savings, enhance testing efficiency, and ensure the delivery of high-quality software solutions. Provar Automation’s ability to handle the complexities of Salesforce testing, along with its compatibility with other platforms and systems, made it the ideal choice for addressing the company’s testing challenges comprehensively.
“With Provar, very early in the implementation process we experienced tangible benefits that by far exceeded the investment. Fortunately, this positive pattern has continued while adding more and more test cases into the solution. Making new Provar Automation test cases is now a natural part of our development, and developing on top of secure automated Provar Automation regression tests allows us to spend much more time on developing instead of on unsecure manual testing.”
– Bo Ritzau Frydensberg, Chief Product Officer, Alm. Brand Group
“I have been working as a system tester for the last 12 years, and all my tests were executed manually. It has been very time-consuming. Now that we have automated so much of our testing in Provar Automation, we save many hours of heavy test workload. Our test coverage has increased and the testing is faster and more efficient. I can use my time on more critical and complex testing activities.”
– Camilla Victoria Tjærby, Manual Tester and Business Developer, Alm. Brand Group
After Provar and the Path to Expanding End-to-End
After adopting Provar, Alm. Brand Group experienced a notable shift in its testing processes. The impact of adopting Provar Automation in particular has been profound, with big improvements in testing effort, speed, and overall efficiency. The company’s previous experience with Salesforce testing five years ago set a foundation for understanding the potential benefits of automation. However, the true impact became evident after integrating Provar Automation even further into its testing framework, expanding fully across end-to-end business processes.
One of the significant impacts of adopting Provar Automation has been the increased reusability of testing components across different platforms. Instead of starting from scratch for each platform, Alm. Brand Group can leverage existing ideas and test fragments, enhancing collaboration and efficiency across teams. This reusability extends to testing data flows between platforms, facilitating easier communication and alignment between teams.
“Provar Automation is the best tool to handle the hardest part, which is test automation on Salesforce. We can reuse a lot of knowledge and skills from our Salesforce platform to both optimize the onboarding of resources and not have to start all over again with new tools. It helps us increase the benefit of using Provar Automation even further.”
– Nicki Bang-Madsen, Test Lead Engineer, Alm. Brand Group
Training and knowledge sharing have also been streamlined with Provar. The familiarity of the tool within the organization and the support provided by Provar have facilitated the onboarding of new testers, including student apprentices. The collaborative nature of Provar’s approach has enabled testers to quickly grasp automation concepts and contribute effectively to testing efforts.
“Provar is committed to making the customer succeed. We have experienced so much of this from Provar over the last five years, as well as excellent customer support.”
– Nicki Bang-Madsen, Test Lead Engineer, Alm. Brand Group
“Starting up with no experience with test automation has been both challenging (in a positive way) and fun. The challenging part has been due to having minimal knowledge of the test automation approach in general, but also having to learn a new tool. Luckily, Provar provides courses through University of Provar which have given me a good overview of the tool and automated testing principles.”
– Anita Vuong Nguyen, Student Apprentice Technical Tester, Alm. Brand Group
Testability has been another area of improvement, with developers adopting a mindset of building testability into code early in the development process. This shift in approach has resulted in optimized development practices and improved collaboration between testing and development teams.
“Provar is amazing at looking into a single customer’s requirements and how they can support and build these functions into its solutions, so it doesn’t only increase the benefit for the single customer, but for all of their customers. The normal way is that you buy a product and then you adapt to what the tool can do, and perhaps you have to buy multiple products to suit all your requirements. With Provar, you can use one solution and fit mostly all of your requirements in your IT stack. And of course, by using Salesforce’s metadata to build their tests, they give you a lot of work for free so you don’t have to maintain four upgrades a year from Salesforce yourself and create objects for every field.”
– Nicki Bang-Madsen, Test Lead Engineer, Alm. Brand Group
One of the most significant successes achieved with Provar was during a major release for the insurance sector. By automating tests with Provar Automation, Alm. Brand Group reduced testing time from 58 hours to just 7 minutes, a staggering 99.8% reduction. This substantial time savings enabled the team to deploy multiple times a day for retesting, significantly accelerating the delivery cycle.
“We were able to reduce our release process from 58 hours across 3 different brands with all products to just 7 minutes, and this was done in just one month. That was a reduction in execution time by 99.8%. The team went from having to wait for tests to redeploy or making bigger changes to deploy to not overburden the testers, to being able to deploy multiple times a day for retesting.”
– Nicki Bang-Madsen, Test Lead Engineer, Alm. Brand Group
Alm. Brand Group currently runs 470 automated test cases with Provar Automation, covering end-to-end testing between UI, API, and database layers across various systems. These test cases encompass a wide range of scenarios, including external API interactions, quote handling, consent management, customer synchronization, lead management, and more. The comprehensive coverage provided by Provar Automation ensures the integrity and reliability of the company’s software solutions across different platforms.
“Our expectation is that these automated test cases will be increased a lot due to us getting more and more resources from Provar, and at the same time, being able to cover more and more across our systems.”
– Nicki Bang-Madsen, Test Lead Engineer, Alm. Brand Group
The implementation of Provar Automation has not only resulted in significant time savings but has also enhanced the overall quality of testing. The company has seen a reduction in manual testing efforts and an increase in testing efficiency, enabling faster delivery of high-quality software solutions. Provar’s reliability, commitment to customer success, and adaptability to specific requirements have contributed to its effectiveness as a testing solution.
“We have been using Provar Automation as the single solution across multiple systems for four months now, and we are already seeing resources automating across all the different applications and layers. It’s a mindset change, since some domains were full manual testing before, but we have made a massive change by focusing on the most critical upcoming releases and how to mitigate any manual testing costs in those releases.
One of the biggest ways Provar has helped us is through their collaboration. We have held onsite workshops and multiple sessions online together to help make Provar even more successful, and the Provar team understood early on that by collaborating, we can grow on both sides. I think the way they are putting effort into their customer relationships is one of the things that have made it a success for all five years we have been a customer with them.”
– Nicki Bang-Madsen, Test Lead Engineer, Alm. Brand Group
“Using Provar Automation as the tool for Salesforce automated testing has proven to be an important lever to obtain a smooth and efficient development process, particularly in regression tests that need to be conducted every time we make changes. They can be over and done with in a short time frame and without a lot of effort from business developers or testers. It saves us a lot of time that we can then spend on developing features for the business.”
– Søren Bolvig, Chapter Lead, Alm. Brand Group
The Future
Looking ahead, Alm. Brand Group plans to further expand its test automation capabilities with Provar solutions. The company aims to achieve parity across all domains, bringing other systems to the same level of automation as its Salesforce platform. Additionally, integrating Provar Grid with deployment pipelines is on the agenda to further enhance automation and streamline testing processes.
The partnership between Alm. Brand Group and Provar is characterized by collaboration and mutual growth. Workshops and ongoing communication between the two entities ensure that Provar’s solutions continue to meet the evolving needs of the company. As Provar continues to innovate and adapt to customer requirements, Alm. Brand Group remains committed to leveraging its capabilities to drive efficiency and quality in testing operations.
Key Statistics
- Reduced release process from 58 hours across 3 different brands with all products to just 7 minutes in one month (reduction in execution time by 99.8%)
- After the first year using Provar, reduced the cost of manual testing by 91% on Salesforce; while platform grows rapidly, timing on regression testing does not increase
- Currently runs 470 automated test cases with Provar with plans to increase
To learn more about how Provar’s solutions can meet your team at all stages of their testing journey, or to share your company’s success story, connect with us today.
