Have you worked with a testing center of excellence? Not Yet!
Every company contemplates enhancing its competitive position in the industry. At this point, they want to do something that will transform their position. Mastering a new technology, creating an innovative process or adopting a fresh business model are few of them.
In today’s business world, one approach that outshines is ‘offshore development’. Outsourcing has become a useful tactic that decreases the cost and gains a competitive advantage.
As international markets have become easier to access, a well-managed outsourcing agreement contributes to short-term and long-term benefits. Not only organizations but even countries are fighting to become the leader of the pack. Every year it becomes increasingly more challenging for the IT companies to grow and develop their business.
Testing Center of Excellence is Need of the Hour!
The global software market is restlessly expanding and as a result of this startups have emerged. Many companies are in a rush to adopt them and remain competitive. Companies have understood the importance of the “testing center of excellence’ model. In this regard they have started collaborating with outsourcing development teams. Furthermore, there are also accelerating the deployment of innovation ensuring the quality of the business processes. The best way to win the race is by achieving excellence with expertise.
In that case, the Center of Excellence plays a very significant role in helping companies win customer loyalty and prove that they completely understand their field.
TCoE is one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd and thereby surpass the competition. The offshore team has a highly effective approach that ensures software outsourcing achieving the best possible results.
Comprehensive Guide on Testing Center of Excellence
- What is the Testing Center of Excellence?
- The necessity of the Center of Excellence
- TCoE features to consider
- Testing Center of Excellence keys to success
- Benefits of Testing Center of Excellence
- Why Create a Testing Center of Excellence?
What is the Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE)?
Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) is a team of professionals that focus on researching and implementing the best practices in a particular niche.
They play a significant role in helping organizations win customer loyalty and prove that they completely understand their field.
TCoE is the hub of creativity and innovation having experienced experts who work towards streamlining processes and maximizing value across an organization.
It is all about enforcing and streamlining sound development strategies and the expertise necessary to fulfill business goals.
When we talk about software outsourcing, a Center of Excellence can ensure that the IT outsourcing team is trained to speed the internal development process and ensure those being implemented.
One example of TCoE can be mobile solutions. This Center of Excellence works with a group of organizations to determine if the mobile solutions streamline internal operations and processes and also customer experience.
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The Necessity of the Center of Excellence
In the world where innovativeness and speed is the key to success, a Center of Excellence is a very good idea. However, there are a few scenarios when TCoE becomes an absolute necessity.
One such necessity is when you have to develop standards and expertise in a place for a component used across the organization.
At this point, the offshore development team’s TCoE defines the architecture, roadmap, and standards for the component teams across the organization and then uses it in the solution.
Another situation is when you have to develop a new skill. Then the TCoE handles the hiring, partnerships and training to make sure that employees learn the skills and it is adopted across the organization.
The TCoE makes sure that the offshore development team you are collaborating with has skills you require with the internal components that may be part of the final solution.
TCoE Features to Consider
You must have understood by now that TCoE is a team of professionals who aim to transform the company in accordance with the new business direction.
The main purpose is innovation and they focus on the testing methodologies. So, if you want to implement this strategy in your organization, it is important to move forward and focus on trending technologies.
The remote development team members should have:
- The knowledge of standards and best practices in the niche
- Have certifications in their respective field of knowledge
- Portfolio with expert publications
- Have previous experience working on projects
Testing Center of Excellence Team basically impacts the strategic development of a company. These centers, not only focus on Research & Development but they ensure strong expertise that the clients would like to have.
Instead of waiting for potential client requests and thinking of what to do, TCoE gives you the opportunity to take the lead.
In addition to the core focus areas, the TCoE adds value by contributing to:
- Optimizing organization and practice by centralizing resources with unique skills and streamlining the contributions across wide area range.
- Improvement of ROI with the identification and development of assets.
- Reducing delivery times, development and maintenance cost by improving efficiencies and leveraging reused assets.
- Identify and reduce the duplication of effort across the initiatives within the enterprise.
When the assets are maintained, it adds tremendous and tangible value and enables the team to rely on proven, predictable results while avoiding pitfalls.
Testing Center of Excellence Keys to Success
- Every Testing Center of Excellence Model comprises of
- Technical Development Standards
- Performance indicators
- Industry-proven practices and trends
- Testing Center of Excellence Success
As the key to success, every Testing Center of Excellence should have clearly defined guidelines providing direction and focus. These areas as the starting point of establishing and evolving the TCoE:
- Standardization
- Leveraging Assets
- Measuring performance
- Guidance
- Subject Matter Experts
Benefits of Testing Center of Excellence
A well-executed Testing Center of Excellence drives continuous improvement and QA team effectiveness. Here are the benefits:
1. You Attain a Clear Vision
Communicating the vision, direction, and roadmap for enhancing the quality across the different organizations is very important for the success of TCoE. The quality commitment is supported at different levels and it has to be in action.
2. Strong community establishment
Every organization has its unique culture so you have to define the scope of your project and vision to develop a community of practice that meets your needs. Most of the best processes and improvement ideas come from this TCoE team.
The remote development team builds TCoE and makes sure that annual and automated testing takes place and all the bugs are fixed.
3. Simplifies tools and methods
There are many benefits to standardizing and simplifying test processes, tools and methods. Therefore, standardizing helps in managing facts by enabling informed decision-making.
Promote continuous improvement
The top offshore developers of the remote team continuously look for improved ways to improve the testing and QA process with the help of the lessons learned or analysis.
Manual testing may sometimes be inefficient. Operationalization and automation are important. Furthermore, automation is not only about regression testing and but for other tasks as well as data creation, test-lab management tasks, and reporting.
So, it is good to focus on leveraging specialized automation and performance testing talent across various business units in order to maximize the reusability of automated test assets.
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Why Create a Testing Center of Excellence?
Here are the reasons:
1. Centralized test Automation Framework
A TCoE helps to consolidate various testing functions under one umbrella, to operate towards a common mission and vision for the business.
Similarly by having a mature QA Framework and standard tools in the Test CoE, there are more efficient test cycles and less time-to-market
2. Expand the test coverage at scale
Testing teams of an organization have limited cross-project visibility, making it completely impossible to optimize test resources and get scale economies.
Hiring QA resources having desired technical skills and domain knowledge is a challenge with projects having high training costs and cross-platform dependencies.
However, when you take help from TCoE for startups, it ensures that the testing resources are properly deployed across projects. You can extend the ‘Open Source’ test coverage at any scale to any team at any time.
Above all, the outsourcing team defines and executes small scale tests and multiple projects are tested in parallel across different geographies.
3. Achieve cross-team visibility
QA testing approaches that your testing team strategies may not be transparent. Moreover, they may not be sure regarding the ‘Return on Investment’. Also, there is no efficient way to track how much is invested in testing and generated in return.
More importantly, when you create an offshore development center and build TCoE, the team has a metric based tracking system that measures the team’s success in their QA process and ROI on testing.
When the testing practices are outsourced, QA testing tools are available with the help of which you can track the results of the testing efforts. However, you can monitor test coverage, test effort, effectiveness, ROI and other metrics. You get centralized visibility and clarity with the comprehensive error reports and analyses.
Intuitive dashboards and real-time analytics give actionable insights that will help the testing team of the enterprise build better applications or software.
4. Best practices and operational efficiencies
Unlike the best Testing Center of Excellence, your company’s QA may lack standard testing processes. Moreover, there is no sharing of best practices, tools, and automation opportunities across various teams.
This results in wastage of time and effort. There is a lot of struggle with the issues related to defect leakage and missed deliveries.
Having Testing Center of Excellence by your side, you enjoy immediate cost savings that open source brings without sacrificing a centralized test framework.
Furthermore, the Test CoE can standardize the testing process within the company by fixing guidelines for test planning, test scripts, and execution.
5. Support DevOps initiatives
Your testing team might not be aware of the new testing trends in the industry. However, there might be no focus on emerging technologies and no framework necessary to test them.
On the other hand, the Testing Center of Excellence teams of offshore development is more business-oriented. Undoubtedly, it is always in sync with the new technologies and trends giving organizations a competitive edge while responding to new opportunities. Last but not the least, you can accelerate test automation and drive quality across the CI/CD pipeline. The result is better code which is delivered fast.
Time to Get on the Path of Excellence
Despite the specific approach to implement the Testing Center of Excellence depends on certain criteria. This includes organization’s requirements, resources, industry, and level of maturity within the technical space.
Undoubtedly, it is certain that the TCoE will evolve and become formalized and will also expand the scope of operations.
While adhering to the fundamental principles, the Testing Center of Excellence is sure to provide the fundamental building blocks. So, there is no better way to make sure that your reliable outsourcing team aligns with your company’s goals.
Build a Testing Center of Excellence that can handle everything. Also ensure that the team has the right composition of talent and will deliver possible results. Finally, this will be done in a manner that promotes innovation in your team. This is very important in the business environment.
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