The Continued Business Case for Test Centres of Excellence 

Over the past few years, IT departments (and their business sponsors) demand better performance at lower cost from their testing vendors. This higher bar is being driven by strategic imperatives to reduce time to market, enhance application and service quality, and improve the return on investment of IT activities. Testing has come under scrutiny since it is fundamental to quality goals and a major cost center.

Not surprisingly, conventional testing methods are being reexamined. Offshoring testing to India is risky, a significant hassle, and not the financial bargain it once was. Using local contractors can work – if you can find the right people at the right price. In-sourcing all testing activities may be ideal in theory, but it is not a practical option for the vast majority of firms given the difficulty of managing fluctuating testing demand with static resources. Moving forward, chief information officers and business sponsors need innovative testing solutions that align with their firm’s strategic goals and support the entire software development lifecycle in an efficient, flexible, and professional manner. Fortunately, an innovative testing model – the Test Centre of Excellence (TCoE) – is now deployment-ready for most medium-to-large enterprises. Moving to the TCoE model has proven to deliver higher quality testing in many large organizations, locally, at lower cost, and reduced risk.

The bar has been raised

Most organizations are grappling with significant IT challenges, such as the need to achieve value quicker with modern technologies and upgrades, as well as dealing with IT complexity and better management of steadily increasing costs and risks. In our experience, testing activities could consume upwards of 40 percent of the total cost of some software development projects. These issues have pushed testing – an area often ignored by IT – to the top of corporate agendas. Recent problems with Crowdstrike, Nest’s thermostat freeze, and similar testing missteps achieving national attention are tip of the iceberg examples of the failures of proper testing to support business and financial objectives. These expensive and public embarrassments are helping spark frank organizational conversations around the importance of testing — the true cost of poor quality and how testing can be best delivered.

Tatyana Dovga, senior partner and global delivery leader for QA Consultants (formerly AVP of Aviva), knows all about testing innovation. She helped implement one of the first TCoEs in the Canadian insurance industry. Says Dovga, “In today’s world of globalization and extreme competition, businesses demand speed, cost effectiveness, and agility – being able to quickly deliver applications to support new technologies, run complex functionality, bring new products to market, and take advantage of new opportunities in order to stay competitive.”

Many CIOs are beginning to explore innovative ways to get more and better testing, at less cost and risk. A TCoE is a compelling solution that is finding its way to the top of many lists.

TCoE: Enterprise-wide Value

The ROI for a professionally designed and implemented TCoE is impressive. Significant improvements in application and product quality are just the beginning. We have seen many companies reduce total testing costs (people, tools, overhead) by an average of 42 percent, improve tester retention by 70 percent, and accelerate time to value (product launch or application deployment) by an average of 30 percent. Companies have discovered other important organizational, brand, and process benefits, including:

• Design with higher quality by bringing testing considerations further upstream in the software development cycle
• Bring new disciplines, best practices, and independence to testing practices
• Increase the awareness of good test requirements across the enterprise
• Enhance collaboration across teams
• Promotion of knowledge sharing
• Establishes a consistent and efficient testing process across different projects, leading to improved quality
• Adoption of best practices

Avoid risk

• Avoid incidence of public failures
• Move away from a slipshod, ‘hacker’ approach with customers serving as testers

Drive efficiencies

• Improve build quality so defects are ‘designed out’
• Ensure proper resourcing and time are available for testing
• Promote the ‘right’ use of automation
• Increase resource (people, tools, facilities) utilization
• Achieve faster time-to-market
• Align testing efforts with the organization’s overall business objectives, providing valuable insights into stakeholders and decision makers 

A Unique Delivery Model

A TCoE is a specialized unit within an organization dedicated to ensuring the quality and effectiveness of software testing activities. It serves as a centralized hub where testing best practices, methodologies, and tools are developed, implemented, and maintained. A formal, centralized structure within the IT organization, a TCoE consolidates all testers, tools, and facilities within one operating unit with a codified set of processes, templates, practices, and metrics. The TCoE is responsible for all aspects of testing within a company, including:

• Strategy, design, and planning
• Tool configuration and automation scripts
• Test preparation
• Execution, defect tracking, and reporting

Ideal deployments

A TCoE is ideal for any medium to large organizations that view IT strategically and expends a significant amount of capital and effort on testing. TCoEs have been successfully deployed in many sectors including banking, insurance, IT, and communications. These companies usually face considerable integration; security and application upgrade challenges and typically must grapple with heterogeneous enterprise and line of business infrastructures.

Key operational pieces

1. People & Habits
   • Consolidate a team of expert, professional testers with industry experience
   • Foster close partnerships with testing outsourcers and contractors
   • Freely share knowledge and best practices
   • • Provide regular training and career planning
2. Tools & Infrastructure
   • Standardize on the right testing tools
   • Track tool utilization and purchases
   • Centralize testing activities in one location that is accessible to business sponsors
3. Governance & Process
   • Establish a common mission, plus uniform processes and practices
   • Accommodate multiple development methodologies (e.g., Agile, Waterfall)
   • Provide suitable oversight, project management, and transparency
   • Align on reporting schemes and metrics

The “secret sauce” of a TCoE is its ability to leverage knowledge, tools, and talent in a symbiotic way. To do this, it combines three enablers that include management, technology, culture, and process elements: 

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“All of these parts combine synergistically,” says Dovga, “to establish testing standards, optimize application quality and performance, improve alignment between business units and IT, and increase QA efficiency. The end goal of a TCoE is to operate as a service for the business.”

Building your TCoE

Moving to a TCoE could be an IT game-changer for many organizations. However, designing and building the model will take time, resources, and effort. To maximize internal buy-in and value, we recommend firms follow these organizational best practices:

• Craft a compelling business case that is aligned with strategic goals and financial metrics
• Secure senior management and cross-functional alignment (IT and business)
• Aim for an end-to-end quality assurance mandate, built back from end user and customer needs
• Establish a centralized but flexible pool of readily deployable resources
• Encourage teamwork, collaboration, and knowledge sharing within the TCoE, as well as with outside partners
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement around practices, processes, and tools
• Regularly engage stakeholders to ensure you are meeting their needs

Importantly, shifting to a TCoE is not an ‘all or nothing’ decision. In our consulting work, we helped numerous firms begin the TCoE journey. We begin by first diagnosing the situation and needs. For example, what are the key IT, business, and customer needs? What is the current state of practices, processes, and tools? And finally, what are the gaps and barriers to attaining better performance? Then we help conduct a thorough financial and strategic analysis to ensure there is strong ROI for the initiative. Based on strong internal needs and a solid financial business case, organizations will move to designing and piloting a TCoE with established standards, optimized resources and processes, and shared best practices. Once value is demonstrated and the model is refined, CIOs scale the TCoE into a mature, shared service structure that supports all business units. Finally, management should pay close attention to change management, talent management, and cultural considerations when implementing this new testing unit.