Prime Therapeutics
Recognized as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., Prime Therapeutics LLC (Prime) helps people receive the medicine they need to feel better and live well. Prime manages pharmacy benefits for health plans, employers, and U.S. government programs including Medicare and Medicaid. The company also processes claims and delivers medicine to members while also offering clinical services for people with complex medical conditions. Headquartered in St. Paul, Minn., Prime serves nearly 20 million people. The company is collectively owned by 13 Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans as well as subsidiaries and affiliates of those plans.
Imad Alassi, a contractor Senior Test Automation Developer for Prime Therapeutics, recently discussed the benefits that company application-testing teams receive from SmartBear SoapUI Pro. The software streamlines testing of internal Web Ser-vices with an easy-to-use graphical interface and enterprise-class features. SoapUI Pro also allows Prime application testers to rapidly create and execute automated, functional, and compliant Web Services load tests in a single test environment—with complete support for all standard protocols and technologies.
How long has Prime Therapeutics relied on SoapUI Pro from SmartBear?
Many of Web Services application testers began using the free, open-source version of SoapUI in 2011. The company upgraded several testers from two testing teams to SoapUI Pro in early 2013.
What prompted the company to consider a new Web Services testing tool?
Prime has started relying more heavily on internal Web Services applications to execute business processes that help employees perform their jobs. With these ap-plications playing a major role in transacting business and working with customers, the company needs to ensure they function correctly at all times since any performance issues can impact the level of services provided to customers. With the increased amount of Web Services development, Prime thus needed to accelerate its ability to test new applications and application updates so they can be deployed faster to end users.
Did Prime consider other Web Services testing tools?
Yes—Prime also owns licenses for HP QuickTest Professional (QTP), previously purchased for other application testing processes. QTP offers an add-on module for testing Web Services, so it was considered as a viable option. But the company found the QTP testing process to be too difficult to work with and wanted a simpler, more automated approach.
Why did the company choose SoapUI Pro?
SoapUI Pro is particularly stronger at enabling re-quests to read data from a data source file and then validating the response. QTP requires three weeks of development time using Visual Basic script code to achieve this, but SoapUI Pro reads data sources right out of the box. It took me only one hour to train two people.
The SoapUI Pro version also costs less than the QTP Web Services add-on. That made the final choice an easy one.
Have you customized SoapUI Pro in any way?
While previously working for another company, I used the Groovy tool within the Open Source version of SoapUI to create scripts for XML test cases and to load testing components. This capability is critical since responses sometimes generate thousands of XML records that need to be checked. Doing so manually is an exhaustive process.
But over the long-term, custom programming to tweak the Open Source version of SoapUI is not supportable, particularly as testing team assign-ments change. Prime Therapeutic thus decided to purchase SoapUI Pro, which comes standard with
script creation and testing capabilities. This fully automated the creation of Web Services tests and the process to check the results. Testers thus did not need to customize SoapUI Pro in any way.
What role does SoapUI Pro play in daily operations?
The company relies heavily on internal Web Services applications to execute daily business processes.
Each time a Web Service is developed or updated, testers need to check many use-cases to make sure the application will perform correctly for all end users across the company. Conducting the tests and identifying issues quickly is paramount since the com-pany needs to roll out new Web Services and updates quickly to enhance business-process efficiencies.
What specific functions does SoapUI Pro fulfill?
With SoapUI Pro, it’s easy to create data-driven tests. Testers can load Excel files with any data a test case requires and then run tests in a loop to read all the data. They quickly verify the expected actual response values and then run each test case individually.
SoapUI Pro also allows testers to load each row from an Excel file that includes all the parameters they want to pass along to a request. When the response comes back from the server using the same row of data, they verify the XML node-value against the expected response stored in Excel. They can also run assertion tests to validate specific test cases using the given parameters.
How does Prime measure the ROI delivered by SoapUI Pro?
After going through one-hour training sessions on SoapUI Pro, testers have utilized the solution easily without any technical support. SoapUI Pro offers that rare combination of simple-to-use while delivering powerful results. Testers can now quickly build and run tests on Web Services as well as pinpoint the source of any performance problems. This allows developers to make adjustments to Web Services much more efficiently than they could do so previously.
What specific functions does SoapUI Pro fulfill?
With SoapUI Pro, it’s easy to create data-driven tests. Testers can load Excel files with any data a test case requires and then run tests in a loop to read all the data. They quickly verify the expected actual response values and then run each test case individually. SoapUI Pro also allows testers to load each row from an Excel file that includes all the parameters they want to pass along to a request. When the response comes back from the server using the same row of data, they verify the XML node-value against the expected response stored in Excel. They can also run assertion tests to validate specific test cases using the given parameters.
How does Prime measure the ROI delivered by SoapUI Pro?
After going through one-hour training sessions on SoapUI Pro, testers have utilized the solution easily without any technical support. SoapUI Pro offers that rare combination of simple-to-use while delivering powerful results. Testers can now quickly build and run tests on Web Services as well as pinpoint the source of any performance problems. This allows developers to make adjustments to Web Services much more efficiently than they could do so previously. As an example of how well SoapUI Pro works, using a manual process to run 100 test cases previously required close to six hours of resource time. With SoapUI, testers can conduct the same number of tests in just 20 seconds. That reduces resource costs considerably.
But most importantly, reduced testing times allow the company to roll out Web Services updates that improve business process efficiencies to the company sooner. That makes it easier for employees to take care of customers.
"SoapUI Pro offers the automated, simple-to-use ap-proach required. I demonstrated to one of the testing teams how much more effectively SoapUI Pro works at reducing the time to build tests compared to QTP."
— Imad Alassi, contractor Senior Test Automation Developer for Prime Therapeutics
Measureable Results
- Reduces six-hour manual test process down to an automated 20-second process
- Lowers cost of resources for testing Web Services
- Enables Web Services testers to more easily pinpoint root-causes of performance issues
- Allows applications that improve business-process efficiencies to be rolled out faster to end users
Business Challenges
- Fully automate and accelerate Web Services testing
- Quickly identify causes of application-performance issues
- Reduce resource time required to conduct testing
SoapUI Pro by SmartBear Solution
- Provides easy installation process
- Offers intuitive interface
- Requires minimal training
- Features low-cost licensing fees
- Offers mission-critical, data-driven testing