ICE InsureTech delivers highly configurable cloud-hosted insurance software used by Tier 1 to major insurance brands across the UK, Europe, and New Zealand. Known for their robustness, flexibility, and remarkable implementation speed, ICE simultaneously supports around 12 ongoing customer projects, as well as implementing new brands, including some of the most recognized brands in the industry.
As ICE evolved from launching smaller, fast-moving startups to implementing solutions for major insurers, its delivery operations transformed. Larger enterprises brought more complexity, stricter audit demands, and increased expectations for visibility and traceability. At the same time, ICE’s own platform expanded, requiring deeper, more structured testing than spreadsheets could support.
Despite this rapid growth, ICE has never had a failed implementation, a rare achievement in their sector due to the complexity and uniqueness of their clients’ platforms. Their latest delivery, a major transformation programme for Aviva, one of the UK’s largest insurers, highlights the increasing scale of their engagements. Maintaining that level of performance while onboarding larger customers created the need for a more scalable, collaborative, and audit-ready test management solution.
The Challenge
Before Xray, ICE relied on spreadsheets to manage their test cases, a method their team openly described as “old-fashioned” and increasingly unworkable at scale. As their client portfolio expanded, spreadsheets became a bottleneck:
Limitations of spreadsheet-based testing
- Tests were difficult to update and maintain as the product grew
- No reliable audit trail for regulated client expectations
- Reusing or adapting tests across different implementations was slow
- Multiple testers couldn’t safely collaborate in parallel
- Evidence lived outside the test documents
- Navigating long spreadsheets consumed valuable QA time
“It’s just impossible to easily maintain and keep up to date a set of tests and obviously as we get more clients and we develop applications more and introduce new features that number of tests increases a lot (...)”
— Adam Goss, Senior QA Engineer at ICE InsureTech
As ICE moved toward Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients, regulatory scrutiny intensified. ICE supports insurers across a wide range of regulations — FCA, Consumer Duty, WCAG 2.2, Fair Pricing, MID, GDPR Data Retention, ISO27001, and Complaints Handling, to name a few — requiring proof of consistent test coverage and traceability that spreadsheets could not deliver.
Testing efficiency also became critical. ICE delivered a major Tier 1 transformation in just 12 months, compared with the industry standard 2–3 years, making it essential to have testing processes that matched their rapid delivery cycles.
The QA team also grew substantially, expanding from 4–5 testers in the UK to approximately 9–10 testers distributed across the UK and Poland. Spreadsheet-based testing could not support this level of distributed teamwork, especially with the rest of the delivery organization already operating inside Jira.
The Solution
ICE evaluated several tools — including Jira-native alternatives — and selected Xray as the single solution capable of supporting their scale, delivery model, and enterprise-grade demands.
Xray brought immediate structure to testing operations. ICE was able to quickly import legacy spreadsheets and build a reusable, organized test repository containing approximately 9,000 test cases, growing daily. This foundational consolidation marked a turning point in ICE’s ability to scale testing with the business.
With Xray embedded in Jira, testing became fully accessible to developers, business analysts, and automation engineers. Teams gained visibility into coverage, execution results, defects, and requirement traceability, without needing to request information from QA.
How Xray improved daily operations
- Traceability: Direct linkage between requirements, tests, and defects which is essential for clients regulated under FCA, GDPR, Consumer Duty, WCAG, and ISO27001.
- Collaboration: Unified workflows across QA teams in the UK and Poland.
- Efficiency: Faster regression cycles, reusable tests, and step updates during execution.
- Scalability: A structured, centralized repository with approximately 9,000 tests used across multiple enterprise implementations.
- Automation support: Xray integrates seamlessly with ICE’s automation framework.
- Governance: Auditable reporting and test evidence to support insurer compliance reviews.
ICE also joined the closed beta of Xray’s AI Test Case Generation, describing the feature as “quite impressive.” The AI generated scenarios that matched or expanded on their own thinking, including valuable edge cases, while still preserving full human oversight through manual validation. ICE found that refining acceptance criteria for the AI actually improved the team’s understanding of requirements.
“We reviewed the feature together, and I saw it as a real positive because it includes a manual validation step. You’re not always going to agree with what an AI produces, so having that extra layer of review is really valuable.”
— Adam Goss, Senior QA Engineer at ICE InsureTech
Between Jira integration, scalability, strong documentation, and a positive onboarding experience, Xray quickly established itself as the right solution for ICE’s long-term quality strategy.
“Fast forward to today and Xray sits at the core of all of our testing activities(…) giving us full traceability and greater visibility. It supports our automation framework and enables us to deliver fully tested requirements with enhanced reporting capabilities.”
— Adam Goss, Senior QA Engineer at ICE InsureTech
The Results
- ~9,000 test cases in Xray and growing
- 10 major implementations delivered since adopting Xray
- One Tier 1 implementation delivered in 12 months (industry benchmark: 2–3 years)
- 0 failed implementations in 6+ years
- QA team doubled from 4–5 to ~9–10 testers
- Testing operations scaled across two countries
- Significant acceleration in regression cycles and reuse of test cases
Since adopting Xray in 2019, ICE has transformed its delivery capability:
- Their test repository has grown to around 9,000 structured tests, enabling large-scale reuse across client implementations and accelerating regression cycles.
- With Xray’s reporting, ICE provides clients with test run reports at the end of each sprint, demonstrating requirements coverage and test execution results.
They are now working toward automated test completion reporting for each sprint. - ICE has delivered 10 major implementations for insurers in the last six years, with another go-live planned this year, many of them large, multi-party transformation programs.
- Xray’s traceability, evidence capture, and reporting capabilities help ICE support insurer compliance needs across FCA, Consumer Duty, WCAG 2.2, GDPR, ISO27001, and other mandates.
- Collaboration across geographies has strengthened, with testers, developers, and analysts working seamlessly within a single Jira-native system.
“It gives more visibility to the rest of the team. Not just the test team, but the developers, the business analysts, it's just accessible to everybody. That really helps us drive the culture where the whole team is responsible for quality and not just the testing.”
Adam G., Senior QA Engineer at ICE InsureTech
Today, Xray is central to ICE’s testing operations — supporting their ability to scale, maintain rapid delivery cycles, and uphold their exceptional zero failed implementation track record while expanding into increasingly complex and regulated markets.
