| Overview |
The Pramerica Quality Assurance software testing department began on July 17,
2000 with six members – Andrea Mc Bride (QA director), Mary Gallagher,
Daniel Rafferty, Angela Gallagher (Moohan), Theresa Doherty (Peoples)
and Stephen Mc Kelvey. One of the initial objectives of the department
was to increase the headcount to 25 within the first five years.
This was achieved by 2001 with 54 people on board by year end,
predominately supporting the Individual Life Insurance business group.
All of the initial staff members still work in Pramerica, mostly still
in QA with the exception of Andrea, who moved to the role of Business
Information Security Officer, and Angela, who now has a role with Development.
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From 2001 to 2004, the QA Department aggressively grew its
presence within the Individual Life Insurance business,
transitioning and supporting multiple systems and applications.
In addition, the QA Department created relationships with other
business groups such as Group Insurance, Service Channel Technology,
the eBusiness Development Group and Annuities, augmenting the testing
support for them.
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2005 saw huge growth within Individual Life Insurance, Annuities and eDG
and the creation of a significant new relationship with Prudential Real
Estate & Relocation Services. That year ended with 11 people assigned
to the account. PRERS, Annuities and Corporate Technology Management
continued to expand over the next few years. With vast knowledge now
within the Individual Life Insurance account, 2006 – 2007 enabled QA
to deliver huge efficiencies, automation and consolidations, resulting
in QA being able to support ILI with fewer resources yet continuing
to support at least the same level of applications. Support to Wealth
Management also commenced in 2006 with a single person, building up to
19 people by the end of 2009.
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Although Pramerica QA augmented testing support to Group Insurance,
this relationship really developed during 2007 and has continued to
grow until today, with a total of 58 people assigned to the account
by December 2009.
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Pramerica’s goal is Growth Through Innovation and Partnership
and as the years progressed new technologies and opportunities
arose for Pramerica QA to bring innovative ideas to the table
while working with our business partners at Prudential. QA,
like all of Pramerica, values its people and recognizes them
as a major asset.
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| Knowledge |
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Our mission is to consistently focus on the total cost of ownership by
delivering value added service and building our capabilities. It has been
QA’s goal to go over and above in delivering value to the customer, ensuring
that all avenues are explored to secure as much business and technical
knowledge as possible about our partners and their applications,
often questioning and challenging along the way.
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Application and business knowledge is a vital ‘need to know’ for any QA team
and Pramerica prides itself on its ability to gain quality business knowledge
quickly and effectively. A key focus is to document and store knowledge
in a repository for the business group – making it readily available for new
team members and others who may need the information. QA recently had a number
of employees move from their QA testing positions to the roles of business
analyst in several different business groups – a huge endorsement of our
skills and abilities.
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QA is very focused on cross-training our staff on new technologies but also
on business and application knowledge from other areas. This will
provide great resource flexibility for the business groups we work with.
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| Partnership |
Individual Life Insurance was the first business group unit that Pramerica
QA supported and it continues to be Pramerica QA’s biggest customer.
One of our first and biggest achievements for ILI was the introduction
of process into the lifecycle and assisting in the rollout and
accreditation of Capability Maturity Model Level Two.
Pramerica follows standard core processes for software engineering
and management practices and has an established group of process technicians,
consisting of Process Control Council members and the Centralized Software
Assurance Quality Group. Process is a key element of success in the
lifecycle and Pramerica ensures process is followed in all business units.
Being successful with implementing process standards has opened up many
doors for Pramerica QA these past 10 years.
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As part of Pramerica’s Growth Through Innovation and Partnership
approach and working with our business partners, one huge opportunity
has been the introduction and rollout of Quality Centre to all applications.
Because of the success within ILI, this tool is widely used now
across most of the business groups we support.
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More recently our partnership with business units such as Corporate Technology Management,
Wealth Management and Group Insurance have blossomed and our partnerships have grown stronger.
Project delivery has been the key objective but in parallel to this we have partnered to
implement transformational strategies focused on a number of key areas to increase
quality and coverage, and to reduce cost. Examples of such initiatives include
process improvements, cross-training and knowledge development.
We have increased creation and usage of regression test beds and smoke
tests to improve the quality of testing. Strong partnership has been a key
element in engagements to date.
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Pramerica QA has a synergistic partnership with all business units
and the development teams both onshore and offshore.
It also has a proven ability to interface with external vendors.
This enables more comprehensive and cheaper system validation.
Pramerica QA optimizes resource utilization and moves highly
trained and skilled resources across the business units as required.
This is a key benefit to the success of many projects as flexibility
is required to ramp up and down resources. A perfect example of this
was demonstrated recently when Group Insurance required an additional
30 short-term employees to complete projects and QA had the
flexibility to meet this need using a combination of resource models,
but ultimately maximizing resource utilization.
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| Innovation |
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In 2008, Business Process Testing (BPT) was a major automation initiative
that was implemented on an application within Individual Life Insurance.
Based on the success of this, Pramerica QA presented and got approval from
ILI senior management to extend this initiative across many other application
areas in a transformational strategy during 2009. Again this has been successful,
with a commitment to continue into 2010 with a similar strategy. In addition, the
QA team will leverage the success of this automation initiative into other business
groups. Business Process Testing, using HP tools interfaced with Quality Centre,
is the testing of the full business process, from the start of a transaction through
to the completion, using an object oriented approach to partition system tests into
business components.
The main benefits of BPT are:
- More thorough testing executed in less time, catching more defects, resulting in better tested applications.
- A reduction in testing and test maintenance time, while increasing staff efficiency.
- Ability to combine test documentation and test automation into one structured effort.
Test Automation, a process where a suite of tests are created,
saved and run without direct user intervention, is a vital component within any QA organization.
Our Automation team has worked across all business units implementing innovative automation solutions.
Test Automation solutions have been delivered to most business groups QA supports.
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In 2009, Pramerica QA proactively identified WHAT? and provided a
standardized suite of metrics across all business groups. Pramerica
has defined a standard set of metrics for usage across test planning,
test execution and trend analysis. Some of the benefits of standardized metrics are:
- User friendly visual performance analytics
- Easy to understand and comprehend daily and weekly dashboards/reports
- Faster project performance evaluation ability
- Trending analysis information
- Meaningful statistics from project
Pramerica QA has also created a solution to provide project status
reports to our business partners through their BlackBerry device. This
has proved hugely popular and very useful for many of our partners.
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| What our Partners have to say about us |
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