7 Reasons Why You Need A Testing Center Of Excellence

Testing teams are constantly under pressure to reduce development time without compromising quality. Traditional quality assurance methods fail as they cannot keep up with the challenges of continually delivering time-bound, robust, and efficient software. This has prompted more and more companies to lean toward the idea of establishing a centralized testing service.

What is a Testing Center of Excellence?

A testing center of excellence (TCoE) is a framework where testing is maintained as a centralized service and shared across the organization. The core unit involves standardized testing processes, formal metrics, required tools, and expert professionals. An amalgamation of tools, QA processes, and human resources, TCoE empowers organizations to implement test automation correctly while enriching manual testing productivity and outcomes. They can achieve a higher QA maturity level as TCoE offers the benefit of scalability and robustness of QA function within an organization.

Does your business need a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE)?

The answer is ‘yes’ if any one of the following SEVEN CRITERIA applies to your organization:

1. Your QA is aligned with project goals rather than the organizational goals: Without a centralized testing framework, the testing teams report to individuals and do not share a common purpose or direction. TCoE consolidates all testing functions under a single umbrella so that they operate toward a common goal, which is, in turn, aligned with the organization’s mission, vision, and goals. This adds more clarity and visibility to QA in the eyes of the top management.
2. Finding testing resources with desired technical and domain skills is a challenge, so projects suffer from high training costs.A traditional QA setup has limited cross-project visibility, so resources are not utilized optimally. Under TCoE, testing resources are organized on the lines of technology and Line of Business (LoB) as per their core skills, which aid in properly deploying resources across projects.
3. Your QA process is not transparent: In other words, you are unsure how much ROI you get from your QA process. Without a TCoE, there is no efficient tracking of how much an organization has invested in testing and how much return it has generated. TCoE introduces metric-based monitoring that measures the success of the QA process in terms of test coverage, test effort, defect slippage, test effectiveness, and the ROI on testing.
4. You desire to reduce your testing time without compromising on quality:  With TCoE, you can achieve a mature QA with standard tools and frameworks, resulting in a more efficient test cycle. Organizations with testing centers of excellence in place show an average reduction of up to 30% in the testing cycle, considerably reducing the time-to-market.
5. You do not have a standard QA process and no sharing of best practices, tools, and automation opportunities across teams at an organizational level. Unnecessary time and effort are spent on reinventing the wheel each time. The test center of excellence standardizes testing processes throughout the organization and sets guidelines for test planning, test scripts, and test execution. It facilitates sharing best practices, lessons learned, and automation opportunities. This leads to a reduced learning curve and eliminates chaos arising from variations in testing across projects.
6. Your projects are often struggling with issues related to defect leakage and missed deliveries. With a test center of excellence, organizations have achieved up to 50-70% level of automation in testing with an average of 30% reduction in test cycles and limit defect leakage to less than 2%.
7. Your organization is not aware of new trends in testing. There is no focus on emerging technologies, and you do not possess the framework necessary to test them. A testing CoE structure helps QA to be more business-oriented. It is in sync with new technologies and trends in testing, which gives the organization a competitive edge and empowers it to respond quickly to new business opportunities.

To sum up

It might seem overwhelming to set up such a centralized unit. But like all good things, a TCoE also requires only a one-time investment of time, resources, and effort. The benefits it offers in return far outweigh the assets, thus giving the desired ROI to the organizations.

Organizations that have adopted testing CoE have reported an average cost reduction of 35% over 3 years. Some other benefits of TCoE are that it brings in more agility to QA and helps establish a continuous improvement process driven by metrics. Setting up a TCoE does require a certain amount of change, along with support and commitment from the top management. But you can always partner with a company with TCoE capability.

Cigniti’s unique TCoE services combine a deep understanding of industry best practices and decades-long expertise in software testing services delivery. We have established Software Testing Centers of Excellence around Mobile, Performance, and Security Testing. We have set up dedicated labs within the organization, which our clients leverage to gain maximum benefit from their QA investment. Our TCoE Services are unique as we take up the end-to-end QA ownership and provide complimentary testing R&D expertise in the form of IP and test accelerators. We also offer a ‘Shared Pool’ engagement model to handle sporadic service demand. Our ability to set up cross-functional testing CoE in business organizations removes redundancies and streamlines testing processes, accelerating the entire software testing life cycle.

To know how Cigniti’s TCoE can help you transform your testing functions, schedule a discussion with us today.