As insurers modernise legacy platforms and increase release frequency, QA teams are being pushed to validate quality earlier, faster and with greater consistency across increasingly complex delivery pipelines.
That pressure is forcing a rethink of how testing is organised, automated and embedded within Agile development models.
Based in Omaha, Nebraska, WoodmenLife is a life insurance company serving members all across the United States.
As part of a wider technology modernisation effort, the insurer has been reworking how software quality assurance is embedded into delivery, moving away from traditional waterfall practices towards Agile and continuous integration.
For WoodmenLife, that shift exposed long-standing tensions between speed, quality and collaboration. Testing had historically been positioned late in the lifecycle, limiting its ability to influence outcomes and making it harder to respond quickly to change. Reframing QA as a continuous activity required both organisational and technical change.
According to Danny Oslin, who is based in Minneosota, embedding quality into Agile teams is not something that happens overnight.
“Looking at getting quality embedded within those Agile teams, it’s one thing when you say we want to be Agile,” Oslin started.
“You don’t just become Agile suddenly and then everything starts working well. And you certainly don’t get to a high level of quality right out of the gate either.”
To address that challenge, Oslin said WoodmenLife focused on shifting testing earlier and improving collaboration across roles.
QA engineers began working more closely with developers and requirements authors from the outset, adopting a “Three Amigos” model designed to align expectations before code was written. The aim was to ensure that quality was designed in, rather than inspected at the end.
“To shift left, change how you’re working, not the work you’re doing,” Oslin explained, stressing that “transform the mindset and the processes, redefine your strategy, and use the tools to help achieve that goal.”
Automation became central to making that shift sustainable. Rather than relying heavily on manual user interface testing late in the cycle, WoodmenLife prioritised automated testing at the unit and service levels.
This allowed defects to be identified earlier, reduced rework and provided faster feedback as code moved through the pipeline.
The insurer integrated automated testing directly into its CI/CD workflows, ensuring that quality checks ran continuously alongside development.
This approach reflects a broader industry push to treat testing as an integral part of delivery automation rather than a separate phase.
‘Robust’ QA testing practices
From a tooling and practice perspective, the strategy aligns with guidance from Daniel Garay, Director of Quality Assurance at Parasoft, based out of California.
Garay has said that “CI/CD pipelines simply automate how software is delivered,” and that organisations need “robust QA testing practices” to replace slow and inconsistent manual approaches as delivery accelerates.
Garay has also emphasised that effective automation must go beyond the UI. “Automated testing helps reduce the time and effort required in manual processes,” he said, while enabling teams to “find defects earlier and maintain quality throughout the pipeline.”
For regulated financial services organisations, early defect detection is critical to reducing operational risk.
At WoodmenLife, the impact of this approach was measurable. By shifting most functional testing to automated service-level tests, the QA team dramatically reduced the time spent on repetitive manual testing.
Automated tests replaced weeks of manual UI testing in each release cycle, freeing up hundreds of hours every month and allowing testers to focus on higher-value activities.
The move also improved visibility into risk and coverage. Continuous automated testing provided consistent feedback on code changes, while closer collaboration between QA and development teams ensured that quality expectations were clearly defined and validated throughout delivery.
For Oslin, the benefits went beyond efficiency. Embedding QA into Agile teams helped break down silos and reinforced the idea that quality is a shared responsibility across engineering, not a function owned solely by testers.
WoodmenLife’s experience reflects a wider trend across banking, insurance and financial services, where QA teams are under pressure to support faster release cycles without compromising stability or compliance.
By combining cultural change with automated, pipeline-driven testing, the insurer has repositioned quality as a core capability rather than a final checkpoint in software delivery, Oslin concluded.
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