Testing Center of Excellence - The power of Centralized Testing

Nowadays, Business is coming under significant pressures to increase productivity and operational effectiveness. Global competition and the digital economy are requiring organizations to rethink how they do business. These pressures are forcing businesses to make faster, higher-quality decisions and to deliver products faster and with improved quality.

Building of a Test Center of Excellence (TCoE) within an IT organization is useful for companies of various sizes and growth related to Quality Assurance maturity.

Before building the TCoE, assess the organisation's readiness for it. Naturally, no two organizations will have the same requirements, resources or starting points for building a TCoE. Therefore each assessment must be tailored to the needs of a specific organization, taking into account its industry, business goals, established processes and software development methods. The assessment can help identify the key challenges in any test organization and analyze its readiness to begin the TCoE conversion process.

The organisation's readyness depends on these factors - Cultural Maturity, Existing Quality Process Assessment, Skill Set Availability, Stakeholder Commitment, Test Tools and Environment, Key Performance Indicators.

A TCoE transformation roadmap includes the following key elements: ?

Scope and timeline: Define the major activities, milestones and timelines for each of the implementation stages: setup, transition stabilization and operation. ? Goals: Establish goals for each stage in the key areas including test automation, test processes, test environment and governance.

Integration: Determine how the TCoE interfaces with projects, management, service providers and other existing quality initiatives.

Staff and training: Assess skill availability and determine the need for resource reassignment, training, additional hiring and augmentation

Core teams: Establish core teams of SMEs around the areas of automation, governance, asset management and other essential parts of the testing process ? Infrastructure and tools: Estimate the cost and resource requirement for buying and maintaining the new testing infrastructure and test management and automation platform ?

Communication: Promote the TCoE through internal communications and discussions to ensure that the entire organization is on-board with the TCoE concept ?

Governance: Define strategic KPIs and integrate the TCoE into the overall IT governance structure. The TCoE KPIs should be aligned with the key CIO objectives – such as cost efficiency, software quality level, time-to-market, flexibility and agility. The governance process also helps ensure continuous evaluation and improvement for test processes, tools and standards.

With the TCoE, companies bring together testing specialists and components to ensure proper testing techniques are used. Creating a group of testing specialists and technical testing components that can be used to leverage testing knowledge, technology, methodology and resources across suitable engagements. The testing specialists will educate and supplement the testing resources that exist within each project team. This will allow for maximum project penetration with a minimum number of human resources.

The TCoE will build a base of best testing practices that can be shared. Re-usability of test deliverable's such as test plans, test cases, test automation, fault reports, etc. will be promoted though the TCoE. This group will maintain the deliverable's as they are created and provide them as a framework and samples for future efforts. This process will increase the efficiency of the testing effort as reusable components grow.