Gunnison Consulting Group
Optimized Testing for Increased Productivity

Vilinda McCann, Gunnison Consulting’s Director of QA and Testing, reckons that organizations usually tend to invest higher than expected time and capital on the production of software, which directly affects their business productivity. A significant reason for such setbacks is that firms can’t accurately predict the number of resources required to ‘test’ an application prior to the release and production of the software. “To address this situation, our team at Gunnison Consulting, has been creating efficient testing strategies for effective utilization of resources in our TCoE (Testing Center of Excellence),” says Vilinda. For the past 22 years, Gunnison has successfully implemented a wide range of testing and automation programs for commercial businesses and federal agencies like the U.S. PTO (Patent and Trademark Office), NIH (National Institute of Health), and FDA (Food and Drug Administration). Over 55 percent of Gunnison’s employees are experienced manual and automation test engineers, with almost 20 percent of the workforce holding accredited software testing certifications.

The TCoE helps Gunnison in improving its existing software testing solutions and ensures success by providing a standard, tool-agnostic approach towards QA. TCoE also helps Gunnison in focusing on consistency, a structured approach to test plans and test cases, reusability of test artifacts, and building an enterprise level knowledge base. Through the TCoE, the company leverages its testing capabilities and empowers the project teams with a broad range of expertise in the software testing domain. “We use customized resource management tools to assist our customers with load balancing by identifying under-and over-utilized resources across the Gunnison TCoE,” explains Vilinda. Gunnison offers its customers a bird’s eye view of the resource schedules along with their availability and utilization to manage resources across multiple projects.

“With the help of our test and automation services, we are committed to constant, close collaboration with our customers to assist them in tackling their most difficult challenges,” says Vilinda. In one instance, Gunnison helped one of its customers in overcoming the major amount of time and effort that was involved to rework and maintain scripts due to many changes made by the client’s development staff.

We use customized resource management tools to assist our customers with load balancing by identifying under- and over-utilized resources across the Gunnison TCoE

These alterations were often without a formal change management process, proper communication, and impact assessments including all project stakeholders. The level of script maintenance and rework was difficult to determine and resulted in hidden costs—not previously accounted for. Gunnison’s testers did an exercise to determine the cost of rework for a relatively minor change that was not captured previously. “The results showed that the customer invested 17 additional hours to perform maintenance during the testing and automation efforts. Based on these findings, we made the necessary recommendations, which were successfully accepted and implemented by the customer,” says Vilinda.

Recently, Gunnison kicked off a new contract with FDA to provide end-to-end testing and evaluation services. They also recently started a new contract at the Census Bureau to assist in testing their field data collection mobile systems as they gear up for the 2020 Decennial Census. Gunnison is also instrumental in helping to spearhead the practices of DevOps with their customers.

Gunnison aims to form successful long-term partnerships with its customers, employees, and business partners, to gain stable and controlled business growth. The company also intends to provide a constant influx of exceptional staff, the most innovative ideas, state-of-the-art technologies, and tools to enable its customers to achieve their goals.