Philip Clyde is a Test Engineer within Flight at Allstate NI and has been with the company for 9 years. He initially joined Allstate NI as a Frontline Technical Support Analyst and held the role for 3 years when he was selected for our Entry Level IT program and was reskilled as a Quality Analyst in the ETRM Voice team. Later in his career at Allstate he then progressed to become a Test Engineer in the My Account team.
My Account is a customer facing application which customers use to access details on their Allstate policies. My Account follow the Agile methodology and are split into scrum teams each handling different components of My Account. As a test engineer Philip is responsible for manually testing any changes which are made to our components. This is done across multiple browsers and devices. His role also involves creating and updating the automation suite and running this for regression for every production release to ensure everything is working before being released.
The main focus of Philip's work revolves around My Account and any changes to improve the user experience. This has meant making changes to the layout and design and building in new features which add value to the customers experience in My Account.
"A recent project I worked on was the Drivewise ADP release for Michigan. It is the latest version of Drivewise where a customer downloads the app and it tracks their driving habits. The premium at renewal is then based on the customers driving and they therefore get an accurate premium. Customers are able to login to My Account to register for Drivewise and be directed to the app store to download the app"
Philip's team use Selenium and eClipse for their automation suite and Perfecto, a 3rd party vendor, to run their tests on multiple browsers and devices. They are also able to run tests on physical iPhones and Samsung devices to ensure My Account functions correctly. The team is looking at implementing Machine Learning into their automation and investigating how it can be used to improve results and efficiency.
Another interesting project Philip has worked on recently is the Shelter in Place Payback project that was created in response to the Covid-19 outbreak. The project enabled Allstate to pay $600million back to customers and Philip worked on providing the information for this in My Account. Due to the immediate need to get information out, it highlighted how agile his team was and their flexibility in being able to create, test and push code and content changes out to My Account.
