2 Goals for TCoE Transformation and How to Do It?

As more and more businesses rely heavily on newer software systems that are capable of handling complex business processes, software development teams are under immense pressure to meet the growing demand for newer, faster and better software systems. Growing competition means a need for systems that can support new technologies and add to the existing functionality with ease. And of course, all this need be done without compromising on quality.

The traditional QA practices don’t really stand up to the agility and scale needed to keep pace with these rapid changes and growing demands. Businesses today think cost reduction, quality assurance and reduced development time; something the traditional QA process hasn’t been able to deliver on.

This is where we need to think the Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE). A TCoE provides a centralized testing framework and acts as a virtual command center that ensures confirmed results.

The benefits?

• Enhance the performance and quality of their application
• Reduce the testing time considerably, which in-turn reduces the time-to-market of the application.
• Creates a transparent process that tracks the success of the QA process and gives a clear and precise ROI.
• Helps in maintaining a flexible pool of testing resources and gets them organized most efficiently.
• Helps IT management deploy the right resources based on the project requirement, effectively bringing down the overall cost.

But as in all things there are the skeptics. A prime reason cited is the lack of relevant resources and experience. Partnering with a reliable independent testing partner with TCoE capabilities can fix that assuredly.

Now let’s look at TCoE from a business point of view. Let’s consider how you can make a successful transformation from a traditional QA process to TCoE, and how you can make it more agile and scalable

Agility

The major goal of a TCoE is to reduce the testing time, deliver quality applications, and enable faster time-to-market rate. Key things that make this possible include:

• Making effective use of automated testing tools and focusing on continued operational improvements.
• Applying industry best practices and implementing latest methodologies
• Implementing test approaches that are business driven, well structured, flexible and with agile testing techniques
• Prioritizing goals that keeps the testing team focused on quality frameworks.

Scalable

Another of the great things about TCoE is that it can be built on a small scale with minimum investment. As substantial improvements and desirable results come raking in, the organization may look to scale up. Here are the key steps:

• Have an implementation strategy in place which helps seamlessly scale the services, capacity, resources and the responsibility of a TCoE with minimum fuss.
• Hardware, software and testing infrastructure needs to be maintained as per industry standards.
• An evaluation plan needs to be in place and this needs scaling up too. This includes hiring additional staff with a specific skill set. Get a data pool in place of the required skill sets.
• Invest in the training of the test team and mentoring them so that they are aware of organizational procedures, industry best practices and have a good knowledge about latest testing methodologies and tools. .

Setting up a TCoE need not be a very lengthy process. Keeping things simple and working your way up as you progress ensures that you can reap rich benefits. So get ready to welcome better quality, reduced cost and reduced time to market for your products by investing in an agile and scalable TCoE.

Want to know more? Or need help setting up an agile and scalable TCoE? Check out Cigniti’s testing services.