Dynamic technological trends and revolutionary innovations have redefined the way businesses operate.  The changing trends have transformed organization preference to a continuous management model. Speed, agility, and relevance are pivotal for organizations to keep pace with the evolving customer preferences. An efficient QA strategy in alignment with the organization’s goals and customer behavior will help deliver the expected results.

To support the testing of such complex and dynamic business processes, the framework of the Testing Centre of Excellence (TCoE) came into existence.

TCoE is a centralized model that combines the testing process, people, and the tools involved in performing the testing. A well-established TCoE framework eliminates redundancies, helps in risk mitigation, improves application quality, reduces cost, and decreases time-to-market.

Here are some of the key benefits of TCoE which will help organizations to achieve immense success.

Efficient testing: TCoE utilizes test automation and data metrics to offer unmatched test coverage within the given budget.

Streamlined process: Since TCoE is a centralized model, it allows an effortless establishment and utilization of multiple resources, tools, and workflows. It sets up a standardized quality etiquette and allows the organization to improve the testing process.

Reliability: TCoE ensures thorough testing of software development lifecycle management; this increases the reliability of the applications. Reliable products/services help organizations gain more customers and eventually grow business revenue.

Defined goal: The centralized test automation framework ensures to work towards a common business goal, thereby, achieving better business outcomes.

Increased agility: TCoE operates on the fundamentals of agile methodology, hence, it responds to new business challenges better and allocates your quality team’s time by priority.

Maximum utilization of existing resources: TCoE brings in the existing resources to make the best use of them without having to reduce/rearrange the workforce, budget, tools, or environment.

Faster time-to-market: TCoE improves operational efficiencies by identifying the errors, missed deliveries, and analyze the turn-around time for further process improvement. Test times are mostly reduced by 30% and test automation increases to about 50-70%. It also helps in improving the agility of the process and allows the organization to handle the challenges better.

Risk mitigation: TCoE optimizes application quality and performance to reduce risks arising from system failures, security breaches, and high-severity defects leakage. This involves the testing of all the functional and non-functional aspects, thereby helping in reducing the overall associated risks and offer a seamless customer experience.

Metrics: TCoE approach helps in the effortless and efficient management of the application lifecycle which defines and measures the key performance indicators of the process. A 2% reduction in the rate of missed bugs has been reported with the use of TCoE, which makes it one of the most reliable testing go-to.

Cost efficiency: TCoE is a highly efficient model to cover all aspects of your testing requirement. In addition, it is to be noted that it is one of the cost-efficient models too. It has been reported that up to 35% cost reduction has been witnessed over a time duration of three years.

Test management: The complete testing covers all areas of testing, planning, analysis, engineering/re-engineering, and execution, thereby, ensuring a high-test coverage across all phases of the software development lifecycle.

Implementing a TCoE to your existing work process can help you achieve better results by streamlining the existing process and benefiting greater agility, stability, and consistency.

How does TCoE operate?

TCoE is established and operated in a few simple steps; they include:

Consolidating the best methods and practices: Creating the most suitable methods for planning, execution, and understanding the policies is an essential step to establish TCoE. Consolidating the ground-level data will help you set the process.

Brainstorming: This step involves training the new and existing testing professionals. Since TCoE is a centralized model, it becomes important to define the role of each individual across all the project verticals.

Standardization: Once the initial setup is completed, the process should be standardized by the utilization of the QA methods, tools, and resources. This can be done by carrying out an initial project on a small-scale, and later moving to the bigger picture.

Continuous testing: TCoE, with its standardized process and resources supports the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process. It complements the CI/CD perfectly by conducting continuous testing, to ensure that the errors or bugs are detected earlier in the software development lifecycle.

Encourages innovation: TCoE emphasizes constantly measuring the test results, allowing to compare and analyze them to understand which tools and methodologies will best work for each test case scenario. New processes or tools can also be tried to check their feasibility, thus, making way for new innovative methods and processes.

Setting up and utilizing TCoE will scale up your business like never before. It offers greater opportunities for organizations to improve their product quality and succeed in the market. Establishing centralized testing for an organization may be a daunting experience. However, like all worthwhile endeavors, a TCoE takes the commitment of time, money, and effort. Its benefits significantly surpass the costs, providing companies with the required return on investment.