A Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) is a model or framework that includes standardized testing processes, formal metrics, and expert professionals. It provides tools, human resources, and best practices to measure the efficiency of the currently used methodology and quality assurance within the organization. It brings the infrastructure and resources together for achieving excellence in testing functions. The company that creates the Testing Center of Excellence is committed to software quality and realizes that they focus too much on documentation rather than collaboration and on cost-cutting over improving quality and reducing risk.

Implementing Testing CoE

When companies think to build testing centers of excellence (TCoE), they have to focus more on collaboration than documentation and on improving quality and reducing risk than cost-cutting. A well-executed TCoE drives continuous improvement and increases team effectiveness, but a poorly implemented one will burden your organization with unnecessary problems, fail to enhance performance, and create tensions. So, we can avoid this by following some steps when establishing the TCoE:

1. It is necessary to get acceptance and agreement from all the stakeholders of the company. All teams have to know the clear reasons stating the need to establish a TCoE. Make sure that they have clarity regarding the changes that will result due to the implementation of the TCoE.
2. Commitment to Quality and Goals: It is essential for a TCoE team to lay out clear and achievable goals in the short term. This can help the team to stay focused and gain perspective towards the higher goal.
3. Choosing the Right Tools: It is essential to decide on technologies and tools that will speed up the process. It will allow the team to figure out whether all the project requirements can be covered or not and determine the familiarity of team members with tools and technologies.
4. Credible Documentation: It reduces the deviation risk and resolution time. Also, it facilitates strong communication between teammates and enables them to focus more closely on their tasks and enhance performance.
5. Automate Redundant Tasks: Automation of repetitive tasks can improve data collection, increase cost savings, improve efficiency and reduce errors when teams start reusing test cases.
6. Right Metrics: It is crucial for the TCoE teams to suggest and implement the right set of metrics including the number of critical defects and rejected defects percentage. It will ensure accurate validation of all variables related to desired goals and help in identifying the areas that need more study.
7. Shift Left Methodology: Cost alone is a very strong incentive for shifting your testing to the left. Shifting left provides some critical benefits; It reduces time significantly, Increases satisfaction, decreases human errors and makes testers be able to focus on more interesting and fulfilling tasks.
8. Keep working on the improvements and constant training; This will enable team members to polish their skills for the project and focus strategically on the successful execution.

The Testing CoE Evolution

One of the best advantages of the TCoE is that it can initially be built on a small scale. When the companies start to see improvements and tangible results, the TCoE capacity, resources, responsibilities, and services can be scaled up.

Each company has its own unique challenges and a specific set of quality requirements and objectives. As a result, the routes differ according to the needs of each company, but often combine one or more of the next four phases:

TestCrew is keen to implement quality tests regularly as well as provide international standards software-testing training. TestCrew also provides all technical, functional, and non-functional software quality test services related to user experience, which ensure the security and protection of end products from vulnerabilities and the risks of penetration, as per the standards of ISTQB and Test Maturity Model Integration Professional certification (TMMi).

In addition to that, TestCrew also offers software quality consulting services, you can also know more about what we do by visiting the various communication channels mentioned on our page, LinkedIn, email, or through our unified number.