BARMER is one of the largest statutory health insurance funds in Germany. Its guiding principle is to rethink health. BARMER actively supports its 8.3 million insured members with all questions related to health, illness, and care, inspires them to live healthier lives, and enables help for self-help by strengthening individual health literacy.

To do that, around 13,670 employees develop innovative care offerings and provide fast access to new developments in medicine, prevention, rehabilitation, and care. But this increasingly becomes a cost-intensive challenge: demographic change and the rising number of chronic illnesses call for innovative, diverse offerings, while members, physicians, and partners expect comprehensive digital services that work as reliably as banking or e-commerce platforms.

Industry: Healthcare
Organization size: 13,670
Location: Berlin, Germany
Products:
- Tricentis Neoload

For health insurers like BARMER, IT is no longer just administrative support. It’s business-critical infrastructure that continuously improves service quality in day-to-day care, increases efficiency, and supports BARMER’s economic success.

The key requirement: digital portals, apps, and specialist applications must stay stable and reliable—even under heavy load—so applications, benefits inquiries, and file access work around the clock without delays for members and BARMER employees alike. “And that’s exactly what we support with our tests,” explains Brigitte Hermle, Team Lead for Load and Performance Testing at BARMER.

Goals and requirements

A four-person team ensures BARMER applications run smoothly even when many users access them at the same time—from the comprehensive SAP landscape to the many online services for members. The ability to test business-critical applications under load already during development and before rollout, is essential: “If portals or applications stutter or even go down, it doesn’t just impact the user experience—it ultimately impacts how our service is perceived. Performance becomes a quality indicator for our services.”

“As a core part of our quality strategy, performance testing ensures long-term trust in our digital offerings—for both members and employees.”
– Brigitte Hermle, Team Lead at BARMER

The team brings real passion to their role. At the end of 2023, it became clear that the existing load-testing tool could no longer keep up with rising requirements, especially for the central insurance information system. Additionaly it couldn’t match the ever-increasing release frequency in BARMER’s agile and DevOps-oriented development processes. The team acted.

They needed a modern performance testing solution—one that enables browser-based testing, is easy to manage, and can establish continuous performance testing with minimal effort.

Key challenges at a glance:

Implement a new performance testing tool
Increase efficiency in maintaining and executing performance tests
Make continuous performance testing a reality

Tricentis NeoLoad stands out

The team evaluated several solutions on the market. A comprehensive proof of concept quickly showed that Tricentis NeoLoad led the pack. It was an easy decision, as Alexander Bosenius recalls:

“NeoLoad had by far the best overall package of all the solutions we evaluated. It didn’t just meet all our technical requirements—the support and the collaboration with Tricentis were excellent.”

Two capabilities in particular won the team over: codeless test design and real browser testing. Codeless design boosts efficiency and speed in creating, maintaining, and running test cases—especially compared to classic script-based tools. Real browser testing is a major advantage for quality assurance.

“Browser-based tests offer the decisive advantage of realistically reflecting the actual user experience and covering different environments, devices, and browser types. That gives us a more complete picture of an application’s performance. It helps us identify bottlenecks and optimization opportunities that often remain hidden in traditional HTTP-based load tests,” explains Alexander Bosenius.

Automation takes it further: for some applications, tests now run every night, without any significant effort from the testing team. That means tests run reliably and continuously without tying up

additional resources. Performance issues surface early, and teams gain valuable time for any necessary fixes.

The results speak for themselves. Since BARMER started using Tricentis NeoLoad, the number of regular load and performance tests per year has increased by a factor of 45. Maintaining and adapting test scripts is now twice as fast, and test coverage has increased by up to 50%. Also valuable: the trend analyses NeoLoad provides after test runs make it clear where development needs to fine-tune.

“With Tricentis NeoLoad, we’ve implemented continuous performance testing.”
– Alexander Bosenius, Squad Lead Load and Performance Testing at BARMER

Overall, Tricentis NeoLoad doesn’t just drive efficiency in testing. It also sustainably supports tightly timed software release cycles and strengthens confidence in the quality of an application and each release. “With Tricentis NeoLoad, we’ve established continuous performance testing: daily load tests ensure every software deployment is validated,” Bosenius adds.

Outlook

Success has a way of getting noticed. More and more business units and developers are taking an interest in load testing—now without the team having to actively promote it. “It shows that the value of load testing has landed across the organization—and it also validates our work,” the two testing experts say in unison.

The team is optimistic about what’s next. “Digitalization keeps moving forward. As we expand our digital services, we make everyday communication with our members simple, secure, and convenient—from applications to direct messaging. Cloud applications are becoming the standard. We’re actively driving all of these steps forward, and with Tricentis NeoLoad, we’re ready,” they conclude.

Results

More efficient script updates as the key to broader test coverage
High confidence in software quality at full load
Implementation of continuous testing in performance to increase test frequency
Continuous testing enables early detection of performance issues and creates more time for necessary fixes
Establishing reliable load and performance tests for weekly release cycles
Sustainable improvement of software quality and stability under high system load

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