Keeping Applications Healthy Is a Full-time Job

Millions of people depend on Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia for timely and effective access to their healthcare provider. And to a great degree, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia can attribute its delivery of timely and effective healthcare access to the quality of its applications. Compuware QAHiperstation helps keep these applications running right.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia has been serving the healthcare needs of Georgians since 1937. With a membership of more than 2.2 million members, it is the largest healthcare coverage provider in the state. The company provides healthcare coverage offerings-including integrated medical and specialty products-for individual, small group, large group and senior markets.

If we can't produce test results on a monthly basis, that would cost us. QAHiperstation saves two of our programmer analysts approximately 16 hours a month. —Theresa MacDonald, Programmer Analyst III, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia

Vital to keeping healthcare products up to date, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia must make regular and frequent updates to its software applications. Making sure that these changes don't have an adverse affect on applications in production is the job of Jo Mason and Theresa MacDonald, two of several programmer analysts on Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia's quality assurance team.

"Each month we do what we call system changes, or release changes," says Mason. "We do testing on our mainframes before the system changes go live into our production environment. Our testing is critical because we must test everything before it goes into a live environment. The testing data we capture with QAHiperstation is critical to us during regression testing."

The Value of QAHiperstation

Providing systems and application programmers and quality assurance personnel with the right tools can significantly reduce testing time and improve application quality. For OS/390 and z/OS-based applications, QAHiperstation delivers complete testing functionality for automating test creation and execution, test results analysis and documentation. QAHiperstation's powerful functions and features enhance unit, concurrency, integration, migration, capacity and performance testing.

For Mason and MacDonald, QAHiperstation provides a very specific benefit to their testing routine: monitoring and recording changes in test regions that will be made to applications in production.

"In our regression testing, we have what we call a base-line environment test region," says MacDonald. "We have five regions that we keep track of, and we use QAHiperstation to monitor everything going on in those regions. We test from a production parallel, copying to a base-line region. We have health system specialists that go into those regions and make sure that what's there is what's currently in production. We have a regression test that tests the system enhancements. Our customers are able to look at before-and-after changes, and if anything is not what it should be, we have our development teams go in there and look for and, if necessary, investigate a problem."

Saving Time Saves Money

When someone from the development team makes online updates, QAHiperstation is there to help save considerable time with its Global Record feature. "With QAHiperstation, we can replay those updates rather than call in that developer," says Mason. "We don't have to say 'Can you get back on the system, and could you redo that change?' We have the ability and knowledge to replay those changes. To me, that is a time saver, which is critical."

"QAHiperstation also enables us to monitor our regions to see where the developers are getting on and where their problems actually are, instead of having them describe the problem to us, which is often challenging because they can't see all of the necessary info. We can actually look at their script and see exactly what they went through."

There's also a security aspect to recording everything that goes on in the regions. "From a security standpoint, some programmers are almost too smart-they sometimes figure out a back way to get in the region just to look at how it's set up," says Mason. "QAHiperstation gives us the ability to review scripts, find out who has logged on, and let them know if they have the authority to be in the region. We do that 24x7, because it's critical that our data remains intact."

For Mason and MacDonald, not having QAHiperstation would mean more work, more effort-and more time lost. "Not having QAHiperstation would cost us money in terms of not being able to find as many errors," says MacDonald. Time is also a factor. "If we can't produce test results when they're due on a monthly basis, that would cost us. QAHiperstation saves two of our programmer analysts approximately 16 hours a month."