In many organizations, testing tends to evolve organically — and that’s where the problems start. Multiple teams often operate with different tools, inconsistent processes, and their own set of test artifacts. As the delivery cycle accelerates, there’s little time left to maintain these scattered testing processes. And hence, when issues arise in production, it’s not because testers missed something – it’s because there’s no unified, scalable system guiding how testing should be done.
The result? Delayed bug identification, reactive firefighting, and more time spent on remediation instead of innovation and new feature development.
The way to change this is to move away from scattered QA practices and champion a centralized quality strategy — built using Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE).
In this article, we are breaking down our conversation with Murali Pyla, our Delivery and Practices Director, to understand what, why, and how of building a TCoE.
What is a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE)?
A TCoE is not just a team or toolset. It’s a centralized quality function that defines, governs, and evolves testing across the enterprise. It brings consistency in tools, processes, people, metrics, and standards — so testing evolves as development.
These organizations see the greatest return from establishing a TCoE:
- Large or complex IT environments that need standardized testing across platforms, tools, and teams
- Regulated industries like healthcare, finance, or aerospace where compliance and quality are critical
- Innovation-focused companies modernizing their QA strategy with automation and advanced tooling
- Organizations with frequent releases that need scalable, efficient QA without slowing delivery
- Global or distributed teams seeking consistency and coordination in testing practices
- Businesses aiming to cut QA time and efforts by streamlining tools, resources, and infrastructure
What Drives TCoE Adoption:
- Standardization Across Teams: Replaces siloed testing efforts with unified methods, reusable templates, and shared repositories.
- Sustainable Automation: Introduces structured, scalable frameworks and CI/CD-aligned automation strategies that deliver real ROI.
- Knowledge Retention: Builds organizational QA intelligence through playbooks, centralized assets, and continuous upskilling.
- Quality Visibility: Tracks meaningful metrics like defect leakage, coverage, and test effectiveness to support better release decisions.
TCoE Governance Framework:
Behind every successful TCoE is a well-defined governance and improvement model that ensures long-term impact. Key components include:
- Executive Leadership & Steering Committees for goal alignment, funding, and ROI oversight
- Delivery & Process Management to drive incremental releases, manage risks, and adapt to change
- Unified Communication Across QA, Dev, and Business Teams, including offshore and distributed groups
- Audits, Quality Gates & Compliance Frameworks to uphold standards and support regulatory requirements
- Continuous Improvement Loops driven by metrics, retrospectives, and maturity assessments
Roadmap to build a Testing Center of Excellence
Organizations on the journey to build a Testing Center of Excellence must look at these steps to ensure success.
- Define Vision and Objectives – Outline clear quality and business objectives, such as improving test coverage, streamlining best practices, enhancing quality assurance practices, reducing product time to market, and lowering overall testing costs.
- Assess Current State – Conduct a thorough analysis of the organization’s current testing programs, skillsets, number of testing professionals, testing tools, challenges, inefficiencies, and overall quality issues.
- Design Governance Structure – Develop a governance framework that defines the organizational structure, roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships within the TCoE.
- Implement Best Practices and Tools – Implement quality assurance standardized testing practices and methodologies with relevant test automation tools and frameworks to streamline testing practices, improve test automation coverage, and accelerate the testing process. Implement standardized testing processes and methodologies that promote consistency and efficiency across projects.
- Build Team and Skills – Build a strong team of manual and automation engineers with expertise in testing and test automation while fostering a culture of collaboration, learning, and continuous improvement within the TCoE.
- Establish Metrics and Measurement – Create benchmarks and targets for quality, test coverage, defect detection rates, and relevant metrics.
- Promote Adoption and Engagement Engage with project teams, development teams, and business units to promote adopting TCoE practices and methodologies.
- Continuous Improvement – Establish continuous quality assurance feedback loops and ensure multiple checkpoints to understand the common pain areas and how to resolve them.
A TCoE is not a side project. It’s a long-term quality foundation. You need the right structure — and the right intent — to make it stick.
— Murali Pyla, Director – Delivery and Practices at Enhops
How We Helped an Energy Leader Advance Their CMMI Level with Testing Center of Excellence
A global energy leader partnered with Enhops to improve their QA practices and implement test automation. Their existing QA setup lack standardization and relied heavily on manual testing, which made it difficult to scale or demonstrate process maturity during audits.
We introduced a Testing Center of Excellence as part of the larger Test Automation Framework implementation. This included integrating open-source tools like Selenium for functional testing and RestAssured for API validation, all plugged into Jenkins for CI/CD.
More importantly, we brought in consistency in testing artifacts and processes by multiple learning and training sessions.
We didn’t just want to patch up the issues. Our goal was to create a testing ecosystem capable of scaling with their ambitions.
— Murali Pyla, Director – Delivery and Practices at Enhops
As a result, the client successfully progressed from CMMI Level 2 to Level 3, with the TCoE and automation framework playing a key role in demonstrating capability, process discipline, and consistent execution across QA initiatives.
Let’s build TCoE that drives business outcomes?
At Enhops, we’ve helped global enterprises design and launch TCoEs as part of our Quality Assurance engagements that bring order, consistency, room for innovation, and maturity to QA practices. We help you to design and implement a Testing Center of Excellence tailored to your delivery model, compliance needs, and growth goals.
Listen to the full conversation with Murali Pyla for more insights, or connect directly with our experts. [Book a meeting]
