Why is Test Advisory needed to set up a Testing Centre of Excellence?

 

The global IT landscape is in a state of flux due to the advent of new technologies and methodologies, changing customer preferences for better quality products, the emergence of newer cyber security threats, and rising competitiveness. To meet such challenges, enterprises should possess and ensure streamlined processes, quality software applications, quick decision-making, accelerated time-to-market, and a better customer feedback loop, among others. Traditional QA paradigms are woefully short to meet such challenges and do not have the capacity to keep pace with the new realities of the day. This is where a Testing Centre of Excellence (TCoE) can help enterprises to gain a holistic insight into the processes and operations. It can ensure the quality of software systems across the value chain, reduce operating costs, and quickly develop and deliver software applications that are customized to the needs of the market.

A TCoE can deliver proven results in terms of optimal performance, better alignment between IT and operations, better choice and usage of test automation tools, and increased QA efficiency across processes and functions. The testing centre of excellence can function as an integrated command centre using the latest testing methodology and practices, test automation tools, and metrics to foster efficiency into the testing environment. It allows the management to gain insights into quality across SDLC and take suitable risk-based deployment decisions. At the software testing centre of excellence, the team of specialists performs multiple roles and draws insights into the challenges and goals of software development, testing, and delivery.

Why does your organization need a test centre of excellence?

A testing centre of excellence can help an organization to achieve its quality testing goals, seamlessly and efficiently. Its need arises because:

·         The QA processes are aligned to specific project goals instead of the overall organizational goals.

·         Projects face high training costs due to the unavailability of QA specialists with proper domain knowledge.

·         The aim to reduce testing time without impacting the quality of systems.

·         Absence of a standardized QA process or methodology.

·         Projects suffer from defects and missed deadlines.

·         Use of dated QA testing trends instead of the latest ones.

·         Lack of continuous improvement in the Agile-DevOps mold.

·         Every project team reinvents the wheel instead of leveraging tools, components, and test scripts from a centralized repository.

Test advisory to set up a QA centre of excellence

The roadmap to set up a transformative TCoE may have the following elements.

Timeline and scope: Identify and define the activities, scope, and timelines for implementing the setup including the earmarking of transition, stabilization, and operational phases.

Goal setting: Set goals for activities covering areas like test automation, test environment, test processes, and governance.

Interface: Decide on the broad parameters and outcomes when the test centre of excellence interfaces with sundry quality initiatives, management, projects, and service providers.

Training: Assess the requirement of skills, identify resources followed by the hiring and training of such resources.

Core team: Since the QA process driven by an efficient and functional software testing centre of excellence would require proper control and management, a core team should be formed. The team comprising SMEs can be for areas like test automation, asset management, and governance, among others.

Tools: Identify the tools addressing the testing imperatives. Choose the tools based on their cost and maintainability.

Communication: Make sure the TCoE concept is backed by the management and every department in the organization is on-board. This is important for the success of this initiative.

Automation: All repeatable tasks should be automated and the reuse of test cases to the extent possible should be ensured in order to optimize cost and time.

Governance: Integrate the testing centre of excellence services into the IT structure of governance after defining the KPIs. Make sure to align the KPIs to the organizational and project objectives comprising the level of quality, cost optimization, flexibility, speed, and agility. The focus on the governance aspect means a continuous evaluation of the test processes, standards, and tools.

Conclusion

Delivering TCoE solutions can help organizations in reducing their cost of operations, fostering agility for the QA processes, and establishing a metrics-driven continuous improvement process, among others. Setting up a TCoE might seem a herculean task at the outset but with proper planning, investment in resources and tools, and training, the benefits can be visible in the long run. It can increase the overall quality of applications and reduce the time of delivery – all guided by a competent team of QA specialists. 

Article original Source:

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How Software Quality Assurance Gets Better By Using A Testing Centre of Excellence?

Quality is the cornerstone to achieve successful software development and meet the business objectives. It determines if a software system is going to be accepted by the users or remains one amongst the countless others swirling on the internet. The software system on its part is responsible for bringing about a seamless integration and functioning of composite business processes in an organization. This is needed to keep the organization competitive, efficient, resilient, agile, and stay above the technology curve.  
Software quality assurance is the process that validates if a software system performs as per the business objectives. However, the traditional waterfall model of QA software testing suffers from inadequacies such as;  

• Lack of test automation initiatives

• Lack of insight into the processes and tools that develop, test and run applications

• Slow or unable to react to the emerging business dynamics. This could relate to the changing user experience and expectations, emerging technologies, and rising competition

• Lack of test automation means glitches often go unnoticed

• Lack of synergy among the different quality assurance software testing services. This leads to an increased cost of fixing them

• Inadequate communication with the development team

• Unable to tackle the challenges of external dependencies

• Slower time to market

• Less test coverage area

• Inconsistency in the identification and elimination of bugs

• Not keeping up with cutting edge technology tools and paradigms

Moreover, increased competition has put immense challenges before businesses. These relate to the need for faster development cycle, testing and deployment of newer applications in the market. In the Agile and DevOps environment of continuous improvement and deployment, these challenges have put the software quality assurance processes under greater stress.  

To address the challenges related to lack of synergy amongst various QA functions of an organization, Testing Centre of Excellence or TCoE takes centre stage.   

What is a Testing Centre of Excellence (TcoE)? 
It is a centralized architecture or framework to integrate the cross functional software quality assurance processes leading to; 

• The optimization of quality and performance of software systems

• Implementing industry best practices

• A greater automation of the QA services

• The breaking of silos across the processes and functions of an organisation

• A reduction in redundancies

• The acceleration of the time to market

• A reduction in the software testing life cycle and SDLC

• A reduction in the cost of testing

• A rich user experience

A Testing Centre of Excellence or TCoE brings about an alignment between the people, processes, tools, and services of an organization as far as QA is concerned. It carries out a metrics-based evaluation to improve the quality testing processes with the stated aim to quickly develop and deploy a quality software application system.  
Interestingly, there is reluctance in establishing a TCoE by many organizations. The reason could related to the initial cost of setting up a TCoE. The reluctance is in agreeing to a change in the organizational culture and its functioning. The other reasons could be lack of understanding of the benefits (tangible/intangible) due to the absence of a metrics based evaluation system and lack of support by the management.  
The centralized framework of a TCoE gives the QA team an opportunity to take a peek into the organizational inadequacies. It also allows the QA team to take remedial measures to plug them. 
  
The Process to establish a TCoE 

• Find out the inadequacies of various processes and know how they hinder the development and deployment of a quality software system.

• Get approvals from all the stakeholders citing the process inadequacies and the need to set up a TCoE.

• Define new methodologies to integrate the QA processes across business functions to reduce the STLC and SDLC.

• Identify the best practices that are needed to be followed and the QA tests to be conducted as well.

• Establish metrics against which quality evaluation will be done.

• Work on a continuous improvement of the processes and tools.

Benefits of a TCoE in terms of adding value to the organization
A centralized architecture: The overarching framework of a TCoE brings together all the QA teams, processes, and tools on an even keel. The framework establishes a standardization of the QA processes to be followed across functions. This breaks the departmental silos and encourages sharing of resources. As common resources are shared, they lead to an increased cost optimization.  
Better identification of glitches:

1. a) In the traditional model, each department followed its own testing methods, which were often not in sync with the industry best practices. This approach often led to overlooking the glitches. However, a greater synergy amongst the departments and processes in the TCoE model leads to better identification of glitches.

1. b) The implementation of test automation means that the inadequacies related to manual testing are done away with. The automated test codes could test a software application any number of times. Thus, the glitches left unidentified due to the following of repetitive testing, get identified and eliminated.

Follows best practices: The TCoE model involves the use of industry best practices and technologies. This leads to a better identification of glitches in the shortest possible time.  

Conclusion 
Establishing a TCoE leads to the optimization of QA resources and helps an organization to respond to the emerging business dynamics in a better way. It is also a cost-effective and smart way to archive all the best practices, frameworks, test cases, and test scripts for future reference.

THis article originally published at Medium.com : How can a Testing Center of Excellence add value to Software Quality Assurance?