State of Massachusetts utilizes TimeShiftX® for Temporal Testing of Health Benefit Exchange

Business Needs

Mission-critical date logic required comprehensive testing

The State of Massachusetts’ new Health Benefit exchange system, called Health Connector, allows for any citizen to easily shop, compare, and buy health insurance plans. The system is a web-based application that has an open enrollment periods which allows people to sign up and manage their various plan details.

The State required temporal testing to validate a myriad of application logic such as:

• Enrollment Periods
• Premium Values
• Insurance Rates
• Campaigns
• Policy Forms & Wording
• Plan Triggers
• Expiration Dates
• Questionnaires

The Challenge

Clock changes met Active Directory & operational roadblocks

Without TimeShiftX, the team was resorting to a burdensome manual process for each time change. Pain points included:

• Burdensome authorization meetings and formal change requests for a single clock adjustment
• Days of cross-team coordination and administrator intervention required per scenario
• Post-test infrastructure repair, resets, and environment instability
• Risk of missing strict Federal Affordable Care Act statutory launch dates

Without TimeShiftX, the team was resorting to a burdensome manual process involving authorization meetings, formal change requests, admin intervention, infrastructure repair, etc. for one clock change. This process would take days and required cross team coordination. By implementing TimeShiftX, this entire manual process was eliminated and the testers were given full power and control to safely time travel their environment.

The TimeShiftX Solution

Virtual time simulation without altering host operating clocks

With open enrollment approaching, the Massachusetts team needed a solution that would enable expedited temporal testing of their application. After review, the State concluded TimeShiftX was the best time travel solution to meet their critical deadlines.

In the Health Connector (ACA) application, each enrollee proceeds through various stages filled with date and time logic. TimeShiftX empowered testers by giving them full control to time travel the entire application stack independently without admin involvement. In addition, the team was able to speedily run through simulations with instant time travel, thus meeting critical deadlines and Agile delivery dates.

Documented Benefits

What changed for development, QA, and operational timelines

Key benefits experienced by the Massachusetts testing team:

• Instantly time traveled the entire distributed environment without admin intervention
• Eliminated the multi-day manual change-request and infrastructure repair procedure
• Allowed QA to quickly run advanced simulations and return feedback immediately to developers
• Plug-and-play deployment with zero custom configuration needed from applications or databases
• Tested complex scenarios across every major, minor, and edge case to protect healthcare enrollees

The State’s Health Connector app allows millions of citizens to enroll for health insurance. Using TimeShiftX, the State was able to run complex date simulations to test every major, minor, and edge case, improving overall team efficiency while meeting their strict federal release schedule.