The Client
Department of Homeland Security
Our systems integration partner had been awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to provide a range of specialized Information Technology (IT) services. The services would primarily be led by Agile development teams in the agency’s existing technology environment while supporting the transformation of its core IT applications.
One of the key initiatives was to support the agency’s Office of Human Capital (OHC) for hiring and recruiting 8,000 to 10,000 employees a year. The five-year contract focuses on assisting the OHC with a portion of its recruitment and hiring operations, which entails hiring highly skilled employees for critical field positions.
The project is staffed by a total of six Agile teams. There are two integration teams and four Salesforce teams.
The Support
- Salesforce
- Monster employment application
- Sitecom Fingerprinting
- Computer-based testing
- CHS Medical and Drug Testing
The Challenge
The initial challenge was to build a new team that would quickly assess the documentation (which was compiled by the incumbent) to understand the system thoroughly before any new functionality was developed using an Agile approach.
This created an immediate need on our partner’s integration team for a strong integration tester. The goal? To ensure data validation as the data traversed across the various systems. This called for an expert who could quickly consume the system documentation and assist with the Agile development of new functionality.
The Solution
By turning to our expert recruiting and staffing team with a rich local network of talent, our expert recruiting and staffing team identified a strong software test engineer with over 15 years of testing experience. Even better, she had over five years of experience working with Salesforce. Finally, she brought a very strong background in creating business workflows, and the validation of data in various reports (Dashboard Reports, Matrix, Summary, and Tabular Reports) which were all critical for the integration tester position.
Our prime integration partner moved quickly for several rounds of in-depth interviews and moved forward in hiring our highly skilled consultant. After the agency-specific clearance was processed, our consultant hit the ground running. She was quick to pick up the scope of the project through a review of the existing documentation and was able to contribute in the following areas:
- Execute tests thoroughly to ensure software quality including running automated tests
- Identify faults/defects
- Communicate with the test lead/scrum team on any issues that may affect the schedule, budget, or quality of the product or the testing process
The Success
Our Salesforce testing consultant has played a key role in the timely rollout of Phase I of the project, and received excellent reviews from our client. Meeting the Phase I deadline was no easy task. Our consultant, along with her other team members, invested long hours testing the data validation of the entire integration to ensure that the end-to-end data integrity was maintained.
Our prime integration partner project lead commended our consultant for her commitment and dedication to ensure that the initial key project milestones and deadlines were met. More importantly, her work helped lay the foundation for future success!
If you have similar needs for high-level staffing for your project needs, talk to the expert recruiting and staffing specialists at The Squires Group.
