DEVOPS-INTEGRATED QUALITY ENGINEERING FOR CLOUD-BASED PROPERTY AND CASUALTY INSURANCE PLATFORMS

Abstract

The high pace of modernization of Property and Casualty (P&C) insurance delivery has accelerated the adoption of cloud-native architectures and DevOps-based software delivery models. Although these strategies contribute to scalability, agility, and speed-to-market, they are also accompanied by severe difficulties regarding software quality and regulatory compliance as well as operational risk in highly regulated insurance platforms. Increasingly, traditional quality assurance methods, marked by late-stage testing and independent tasks, are not sufficient to deal with the complexity of cloud-based systems, their distributed nature, and constant change. The current paper discusses combining DevOps and Quality Engineering (QE) as a single approach to quality software delivery in cloud-native platforms of P&C insurance. It begins by explaining the weaknesses of traditional insurance IT and quality models in terms of structural constraints that prevent reliability, auditability, and responsiveness. Then, the discussion goes on to discuss the notion of how the principles of DevOps, specifically the idea of continuous integration, automation, observability, and shared ownership can enhance the quality of software by means of continuous validation of the latter integrated into delivery pipelines. It is based on this that this study introduces DevOps-Integrated Quality Engineering (DI-QE) framework to meet the operational and regulatory demands of P&C insurance systems. The framework incorporates automated testing, environment standardization, quality measures, and compliance controls within the continuous delivery work process. It also deals with cloud-native quality engineering, risk-oriented quality indicators and governance mechanisms based on compliance needs of a platform in contemporary insurance. This paper will provide actionable information to the researcher and practitioners interested in enhancing the software reliability, minimizing the delivery risk, and keeping regulatory compliance, harnessing the power of DevOps, and cloud technologies by providing a domain-specific approach to engineering quality into cloud-native insurance systems.