I have earlier written in Part I about the challenges of a testing organization. We also touched upon shortly about the solution, which is a Testing Centre of Excellence (TCoE). In this post, let us see in detail what exactly a Testing Centre of Excellence is.

In a traditional model of testing, members of separate project teams do the verification and validation in the software development lifecycle. These teams need to be trained for each project and is not an efficient process. Additionally, they cannot ensure consistent quality across a business unit as they are focused on specific projects that have varying levels of budget allocation.

TCoE

Assume that there are 6 projects that are carried out in a business unit; each project will have phases like requirements, design, development, testing, deployment and support. In a TCoE, testing as a function is kept as a shared service across all the 6 projects that provide unbiased verification and validation.

I am planning to cover this topic in two parts:

Part I will deal with the challenges of a testing organization and the solution for the challenges.
Part II will specifically talk about the solution in detail and how to implement the solution.

The challenges of the testing organization can be categorized as follows:

Business Analyst Challenges

• Product does not meet user requirements. Business requirements are not properly transformed into functionality
• Time spent to support different teams for requirements clarifications is too high

Management Challenges

• Customer is facing lots of issues after ‘Go Live’
• Cost and effort spent are increasing exponentially
• Availability of software, to market on time are always a question mark

Development Challenges

• Requirements keep on changing and we don’t get clarification on time