Introduction to Testing Center of Excellence

How often you review your test automation strategies? Have you been able to adopt new testing tools to the fullest? What sort of training and learning programs are required for your manual testers to achieve automation skills? How much your test automation maturity has improved over the last year? What kind of business metrics are you tracking to estimate test automation success?

These are all common quality engineering questions that may be difficult to answer. Obtaining those answers require deeper insights into not only quality engineering or testing or quality assurance function but also current testing practices. These needs investing and building a separate functional unit known as Testing Center of Excellence and how it can help organizations in being on top of these questions.

In this post, we will discover what is testing center of excellence and how establishing testing center of excellence can help organizations in getting answers concerning all parts of software testing lifecycle:

What is Testing Center of Excellence

Testing Center of Excellence is an organized function within any organization that helps in achieving standardization across test processes and activities while helping teams to utilize their resources optimally. It assesses need of implementing new tools, technologies, and frameworks for achieving excellence in testing functions. It promotes innovation to improve the release lifecycles and quality of digital applications.

The purpose-built Testing Center of Excellence implies deciding on business KPIs and metrics that will help in achieving business objectives like improving customer acquisition rate, decreasing customer churn rate, increasing customer lifetime value, and more.

Signs that you need a Testing Center of Excellence

Here are a few signs that your organization needs a Testing Center of Excellence. If anyone or combination of these signs are present, talk to us to get started you with a quality transformation journey.

1. You require software products to serve your customers better – It might sound cliché, but software continues to eat the world. As they say every organization is now a software organization. If your organization requires software to reach, serve, and delight customers, you certainly can’t afford manual and outdated testing methods for long.
2. Your organization is rapidly growing – A rapidly growing organization means rapidly growing customer base. At this stage, you can’t afford low quality software release and bugs slipping into production. This is a good phase to evaluate your current test automation levels and start educating stakeholders about the potential benefits of having a testing center of excellence.
3. You have frequent software releases – If your development team follows weekly or monthly cadence in terms of software releases, test automation is a must for you. Testing Center of Excellence can help you in getting started with test automation or scaling your testing efforts by working alongside development and testing teams.
4. You are still doing manual testing (only) – If your organization or development/testing teams are still relying on manual and outdated testing methods, it is time to move to strategic test automation to boost the software quality and improve employee productivity.
5. You are doing automation in pockets – If your automation efforts are limited to one team or department without giving any significant results, it is the sign to adopt and establish Testing Center of Excellence. At Enhops, we have helped multiple organizations in scaling their automation efforts by our onsite and offshore + onsite model where we have established successful testing center of excellence for them.
6. You are keen on upskilling your test engineers – If your organization thrives on innovation and wants its employees to stay ahead of the curve by giving them frequent chances of upskilling and reskilling, testing center of excellence can get you a head start in the same. Testing center of excellence are comprised of automation experts that understand various automation tools and technologies and help organizations in creating a learning path for their test automation engineers.

How to establish a Testing Center of Excellence

Establishing and running Testing Center of Excellence successfully can be an uphill task. Often, organizations start quality engineering initiatives that get stalled by day-to-day operations. Establishing Testing Center of Excellence means having a dedicated functional unit that keeps a tab on quality aspects while taking care of innovation and implementing new tools and technologies –

• Purpose built Testing Center of Excellence with vision and goals – While starting journey towards TCoE, it is important to understand current business objectives and goals that you are wanting to achieve. TCoE must be linked to specific goals like achieving better quality of software, efficient use of tools and automation, and cost-effectiveness for testing process.
• Get buy-in from C-Suite – Although TCoE brings in great benefits, it’s also a significant and up-front one-time investment in terms of time and resources. It is important to run a detailed plan of cost and benefits with senior management and take their inputs to ensure you have right resources and time to start the process.
• Outsource TCoE program – A TCoE is only as good as the people who work to establish and run it. Most organizations don’t have in-house skills and resources to start the testing center of excellence. Establishing testing center of excellence require experienced team of professionals who bring in expertise defining and execution QA strategy, approach, and execution. It is recommended to work with quality engineering experts that can own QA and Test Automation initiatives, automation tools development and engineering best practices.
• Start small and scale up – It is important to understand that automation and quality engineering practices need to approach in a phase wise manner by starting small pilot projects and apply learnings to scale them. As you gain experience, TCoE and its practices can be scaled up to meet needs of any organization.

Outcome Based Testing Center of Excellence

For any organization, quality has become the main differentiator. From adopting new technologies to modernizing their core legacy platforms, it’s important to make sure that end-users receive the best experience across all channels. This requires more progressive and iterative approaches to achieve required quality that can significantly mitigate the risks while upgrading core legacy programs or migrating applications to cloud.

Put simply, the time to get hold of your quality engineering initiatives is now.

Testing Center of Excellence can be one of the initiatives for organizations to achieve their quality engineering goals. But executing and implementing testing center of excellence is no easy task. The success stories of testing center of excellence are far outnumbered by the failures. These failures might look like programs that overran, overspent, performed poorly and ultimately failed to achieve real outcomes.

Testing is not a usual business now; it requires strategy and planning

Quality is no more an after-thought. Business leaders are increasingly realizing the importance of paying attention to quality programs. The prevalence of 5G and internet economy, adoption of hybrid and cloud environments, embracing new age technologies like IoT, blockchain, big data have changed the way quality is being looked upon.

To stay ahead of the quality commitments, business leaders surely need to invest and build a village comprises of partners, stakeholders, service providers, and in-house quality engineers that work at the frontline of quality engineering shifts and solutions. At Enhops, we consider quality as a breakthrough and thus, helps organizations in making it part of their business strategy from inception to delivery.

Want to prep your business case for Testing Center of Excellence? Talk to us  – marketing@enhops.com