Centralizing Focus for Excellence with Quality Engineering

The high incident rates of failures under legacy software development methodologies caused several companies to go obsolete. The staggering number of failures and lost revenues created an intense need for a robust mechanism to control and ensure quality. Quality Engineering, by shifting testing to the left, has answered that need quite efficiently. It broke the shackles that hindered free flow of critical information between different teams.

QE has bulldozed the walls around siloed software development teams. It has laid out a smooth, straight pipeline and a continuous feedback cycle for continuous integration and continuous deployment. Instead of checking a product on quality parameters after a code is developed, quality engineering promotes building excellence into the code itself.

With the emergence of digital technologies, the demand for agility and quality is on a rapid climb in the market. To match that pace, it is critical to shift the mindset as well as organization culture into dropping the reactive approach and adopting a proactive outlook. Quality Engineering services not only enable faster time to market, but also reduce testing costs while improving customer satisfaction and product quality.

By guaranteeing maximum test coverage through shift-left strategy, quality engineering facilitates continuous integration and deployment. As businesses, users, and user experience attract the key focus more than the defects, establishing a Quality Engineering Center of Excellence or QE CoE becomes essential. A QE Center of Excellence offers a complete view of what, when, where, why, who, and how in an SDLC. It optimizes the use of available people, tools, and processes, promotes reusability, and reduces efforts and testing costs.

Why you need a QE CoE?

Gartner defines a Center of Excellence as a physical or virtual center of knowledge concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.

A QE CoE encompasses every aspect of a product development life cycle, including management, design, operations, and legal. By bringing resources from IT management, product management, software and systems engineering, and system operations under one roof, such centers of excellence leverage the skills and expertise of the best to ensure reliability, security, and safety of services.

Quality, time, and costs are the three major benefits that a QE CoE brings to the table. But these three benefits are only the tip of the iceberg. Since, a QE CoE is pillared on the overall mission and vision of a business, the iceberg of QE CoE benefits is much deeper than what appears on the surface. They affect the very core of business processes by changing the fundamental way of executing processes.

1. It removes inter-departmental friction: With the implementation of a QE CoE, the old ways of downstream or upstream workflows are abolished. Key individuals from each department are brought together to work cohesively on a common objective. This not only eradicates the possibility of a blame-game that ensues in case of a failure, but also boosts collaboration between dev, ops, and test.
2. Promotes knowledge sharing and management: While quality engineering enables knowledge mapping through software and system models, a quality engineering center of excellence pushes these models beyond their existing capabilities. Manifold structured as well as unstructured data is computed and analyzed for identifying and mitigating errors at their occurrence.
3. It is aligned with the business objectives: A center of excellence is driven to achieve quality in a project that ultimately helps propel the business forward. By aligning itself to the business goals. QE CoE leads an organization closer to its projected vision.
4. Eliminates or diminishes risks and vulnerabilities: When all the teams are working closely, a QE CoE offers absolute transparency in the processes. This end-to-end visibility decreases the chance of a missed error to negligible. Risks and vulnerabilities are detected early in the process, and effective measures are instigated in time.
5. Encourages innovation and experimentation: With the deployment of automation and delegation of majority of tasks to the center of excellence, other resources get the time to churn out new ideas and get a window to experiment with them.
6. Optimizes defect detection and prevention: With quality engineering, automation becomes the driver of processes with manual supervision as the driving force. The specificity of the detail-oriented automation eye brings forth those defects that a human eye might miss.
7. Reduces overall efforts but enhances productivity: As automation takes over the labor-intensive, iterative processes, the overall efforts required are significantly reduced. However, this reduction does not translate into lowered productivity. On the contrary, when the human resources are not exhausted, they can actively involve themselves into bringing creativity to the existing processes.

To conclude

Through a system of shared resources, a center of excellence for quality engineering propagates a collaborative culture with a vision to attain the desired business goals. Instead of individual metrics, such QE CoE is measured and aligned as per the whole organization’s objectives. It enhances an organization’s capabilities by driving excellence out of mediocrity, ultimately generating high user satisfaction and better revenues.

Cigniti’s Quality Engineering services cover the Software Testing Life cycle, Test Consulting and Test Advisory services, Test Implementation, and Managed Testing services including Test Environment Management and Test Data Management. Leveraging process frameworks, methodologies, and tools, we help customers across various industries achieve first-time-right solution releases, quality improvements, and deliver a superior customer experience.

In addition to Testing Centers of Excellence specializing in areas such as automation, Performance Testing, and Test Data Management, we at Cigniti have industry-focused Testing Centers of Excellence on Healthcare, Banking, Retail, Financial Services, Airlines, Insurance and many other verticals.

Get in touch with us to utilize our engineering-led, analytics driven, early & continuous testing practices to accelerate your DevOps processes and generate greater ROI on your Quality Engineering initiatives.