Insurance Application Testing: A Comprehensive Guide
Insurance applications are essential for brands to deliver services, meet customer expectations, verify and pay out claims, and soon. The design of such applications also impacts its compliance with stringent financial regulations (often differing for different locations).
These apps must support end users, insurance agents, sales personnel and numerous other stakeholders. This is no easy feat, given the challenges of ever-changing customer expectations, shifting and narrowing regulations, and constant competitive pressures.
In light of this, insurance apps need to undergo rigorous testing. Since these apps handle operations around significant sums of money, they cannot afford to glitch (certainly not during actual financial transactions like payments and payouts).
That’s what this article will explore—the what, why, how, and examples of insurance application testing.
What is insurance application testing?
Insurance application testing or insurance software testing covers a number of testing techniques and methodologies that verify how an insurance-related app operates in the real world. It verifies the application’s compatibility, reliability, quality, security and performance as benchmarked against industry standards.
Reasons to run insurance app testing in your SDLC
Verifies that insurance software adheres to laws and industry regulations such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR. Not complying with such regulations will inevitably lead to fines and lawsuits.
Verifies the app’s accuracy in processing premiums, claims, coverage limits, and customer information so that there are no errors in issuing, renewing, canceling and settling claims.
Verifies that customers’ sensitive personal and financial data is adequately protected by identifying and eliminating vulnerabilities in data security.
Ensures that insurance portals can handle a high volume of users, especially during peak times. The app must perform reliably under stress without crashing or slowing down.
Ensure that the app integrates with third-party tools like CRMs, government databases, payment gateways and so on. Data must move consistently and without changes between these systems.
Verifies that automated workflows for claims processing and policy renewals work correctly and are triggered at accurate events.
Enables early detection of bugs and issues, which helps avoid operational disruptions, reputational damage, and financial losses in the long run.
Modules or Components to be verified in Insurance Application Testing
Insurance domain testing has to verify the accuracy of multiple modules to facilitate tasks like filling out policy forms, displaying, explaining and validating billing policies, underwriting and customer data management. There’s also CRM integration, case management and claims management.
Underwriting
Insurance services include an underwriter to evaluate the risks associated with selling insurance to each customer. To make this decision, the underwriter (whether manual or automated) considers multiple factors, such as their driving history, medical records, place of residence, income levels and lifestyle expenditure.
The insurance app should have an organized, accurate and reasonable system underwriting process. Since all policies cannot be manually verified, automation systems must be thoroughly tested for accuracy and efficacy. The system should be able to ask the right questions, ask for the right documents, create appropriate risk profiles, and notify potential customers of process completion, error detection or requirements for further information.
Quote System
Once the customer/applicant submits their application, the system provides a quote to the insurance agent, who then offers the customers the expected premium and coverage costs.
Insurance app testing must validate essential points in the quote system: rate structure to generate quotes, customizability features to create personalized plans, and policy start dates.
Case Management
After sharing the quote with the customer, the ball is in their court. Once a quote is sent to the customer, all carriers receive information about them with relevant details. Carriers study these details and offer potential deals to the agent. These deals are shared with the customer, out of which they can choose one and send a formal request to the carrier.
This module requires extensive and granular organization and communication between different systems. The customer must receive detailed quotes with clear benefits quickly. Tests should verify this by examining the app’s regulation compliance and adherence to predetermined guidelines when studying cases, offering quotes and curating plans for each customer.
Document Management
The app must accept and maintain relevant documents to trigger and execute certain processes. These documents should be stored, retrieved and shared between the right individuals at the right triggers.
Test that document management proceeds as laid out in the requirements document, as well as version control and role-based access operations. Verify that the system can organize and prioritize documents pertaining to policies and claims. The database should be searchable as well.
CRM Integration
CRM, or customer relationship management, is essential for maintaining customer loyalty for the long term. Every insurance broker and provider knows that customers’ decision to renew a policy depends on their relationship with the insurance agent and carrier.
CRM solutions need to be integrated with insurance applications so that agents have immediate access to customer details. Keeping this data consistent for all professionals in a firm is essential for keeping customers satisfied and retained.
Tests in this regard must validate that CRM tools integrate easily with the insurance app and also provide:
Data and experiences designed to guarantee positive user experiences that retail customers.
Easy assignments around claims that are automatically allocated to agents.
Streamlined and accessible databases with essential customer information.
Claims Management
Customers need a pristine, intuitive and responsive system to make claims on their insurance policy. QAs must test the process of submitting and handling claims. Test the automated workflows for submitting a claim, sending response messages, verification processes, transaction processing, policy maturity calculations, and settlement payouts..
Policy Admin System
The policy admin system stores customers’ personal details and relevant information—data required to process claims and pay out settlements. This system must work flawlessly, with security mechanisms guarding them from unauthorized access.
Don’t forget to test the disaster recovery and backup systems. In any case of deletion, this information should be fully restored with failover mechanisms taking over. Verify backup schedules, recovery processes, system integrity, and data consistency after restoration.
Best Practices for Insurance Application Testing
Run data-driven tests
Data-driven tests, as the term suggests, use data sets as the input variables for test cases. Testers design these data sets to cover multiple user scenarios and monitor how the app handles each one. For example, here’s how to run a data-driven test for calculating the insurance premium for a new customer:
Identify and ask for necessary inputs from the customer: age, gender, location, and coverage amount.
List all necessary tests.
Create data sets for each test. Each set should include the input variables and expected output—the premium amount, in this case.
Build a test script to read these data sets and run calculation steps.
Run tests.
Check that the calculated amount for each test matches the expected numbers. If it doesn’t, the test fails.
Use failures to diagnose errors and readjust the calculation algorithm.
Re-run tests until the actual and expected results are the same.
Prepare for complex business logic
Due to the nature of the industry, insurance apps will contain complex business logic for necessary workflows. Expect to invest significant time and resources and deal with changing business requirements that will lead to code changes.
Start with clearly understanding the business rules and workflows. When creating test cases, prioritize the scenarios that matter most to the business and CX.
Test for multi-platform compatibility
Insurance companies will always interact with customers on multiple platforms, browsers and devices. Given the nature of browser and device fragmentation, this will require investment in a real device cloud, such as one offered by Testgrid.
When designing tests for this purpose, rank platforms in terms of relevance to the business. Invest in automation tools (even though it will require some upfront expenses), as it will accelerate time to market and drive profits in the long run.
You can always create an in-house device cloud, but that will require buying and setting up hundreds of real devices. Your team will also have to install operating systems and browsers and keep updating them.
This requires a massive amount of time and work and will hold you back from fast release cycles. The device cloud is a more immediate and yet sustainable solution.
Find the breaking points for software performance
Once you start running performance tests, push the system to increasing loads (user activity, transactions, etc.) to find breaking points—points at which the system crashes or at least becomes unstable. For instance, determine the system’s maximum user load during peak events (e.g., open enrollment) and identify the point where performance degrades or fails.
Next, work to push the breaking points to further limits. Modern apps should be able to handle high volumes of traffic and usage activity without any significant loss in productivity.
Use integration testing to identify issues with data consistency and inefficiency
Insurance apps work with multiple essential modules—the policy administration system (PAS), the claims management system (CMS), and the customer relationship management (CRM) system, for instance. While they might work perfectly well in isolation, inconsistencies in datasets and operational bottlenecks can show up when these modules are integrated.
Test the touchpoints between these systems. For instance, let’s say that a claims adjuster updates a claim’s current status in one module, but the numbers are not equally updated in the billing module. The customer will receive an inaccurate amount on their bill, which is a massive misstep in operations.
QA processes should be able to identify such errors well before the app hits production.
Sample test cases for Insurance Application Testing
Testing the User Management Module
#1
Intent: To verify that user registration works as expected with valid inputs.
Test Steps: Enter valid details (name, password, email, etc.) and press Submit.
Expected Result: The user is successfully registered and receives a confirmation email notifying them of the same.
#2
Intent: Verify the workings of the login function by feeding it inaccurate data.
Test Steps: Enter incorrect data into the email/password fields on your insurance’s app’s main page.
Expected Result: The system should return an error message notifying the user that they have entered invalid credentials.
#3
Intent: Check that users can reset passwords by testing the workflow built for this function.
Test Steps:
Click on the “Forgot Password” link on the login page.
Enter your registered email.
Expected Result: The user receives a password reset link via email, which they can use to securely change their password.
Testing the Policy Management Module
#1
Intent: Verify that new policies can be created with the right input values.
Test Steps:
Log in to the app.
Select the type of policy.
Enter relevant, valid data points.
Click Submit.
Expected Result: The app displays a message stating that the policy has been created successfully.
You also get an email notifying you of the same, with the policy document and other necessary information attached.
#2
Intent: Verify that a policy close to its expiration date can be renewed.
Test Steps:
Navigate to the “Renew Policy” link/button in the insurance app.
Go through all the steps and enter all inputs required to renew the policy.
Click Submit.
Expected Result: You get an email and/or a message notifying that the policy has been renewed successfully.
#3
Intent: Checking that a policy can be canceled via the online app.
Test Steps:
Select the active policy to be canceled.
Click “Cancel”.
Go through all the necessary steps.
Confirm cancellation of policy.
Expected Result: The policy status changes to “canceled.” You receive an email notifying you of the same.
Testing the Claims Management Module
#1
Intent: Verifying that a claim can be submitted with all the required information.
Test Steps:
Select a policy via the insurance app.
Enter claims details (accident date, amount, etc.).
Click Submit.
Expected Result: The app displays a message stating that the claim has been submitted successfully. A claim ID is generated and sent via email (also stored on the app).
#2
Intent: Verify that claims functioning does not work with missing data.
Test Steps:
Submit a claim following the steps in the previous test.
Leave one or more mandatory fields blank.
Click Submit.
Expected Result: The app throws an error message, asking the user to fill in the missing information.
Conclusion
In conclusion, insurance application testing is a critical step in ensuring the reliability, compliance, and user-friendliness of insurance software. Rigorous testing guarantees that these applications can manage sensitive data, process transactions accurately, and adhere to complex regulations. By verifying functionality across modules like underwriting, claims, and policy administration, businesses can deliver seamless user experiences and maintain operational integrity. This proactive approach ultimately reduces risks, enhances customer trust, and strengthens the competitive edge of insurance providers.
Source: This blog was originally published at https://testgrid.io/blog/insurance-application-testing/