Why CxOs must implement a Testing Center of Excellence

To provide the right kind of user experience, it is critical to ensure the reliability, performance, stability, security, and quality of an app – whether it is an enterprise level or a consumer-oriented application.

Today, the C-level executives are aware that technology environments are getting increasingly multifaceted and are changing at a very fast pace. To provide more functionality and capability, they need to optimize their resources in the best possible way. They know that if they are laidback, or apply out-of-date tools and approaches to these new challenges, they risk serious business disruption due to technology failures. They also risk staff burn out, and worse, may lose some of their most valuable and critical team members.

Additionally, most businesses have understood that if they continued with the existing practices, it is most likely that their functional teams would be doing manual testing for a long time. More and more organizations are realizing that this is not the optimized use of their teams’ time and resources. Enterprises today simply can’t afford to have these functional business experts, who are in high demand today, to work on anything but high value-added activities.

This has given the need for is driving the push to efficiency and automation. Business surveys indicate that most companies – almost about 40% – are adopting Testing Centers of Excellence (TCoEs). The most successful CxOs have understood the business-critical need of setting up a TCoE. They have led their organizations develop in-depth competencies around quality testing and test automation – approaches that have become critical in todays’ competitive market.

Why a Testing Center of Excellence?

A TCoE helps create an environment where strategic assets – namely people, process, and technology -work together to build quality within an enterprise. It leverages various tools as per an organization’s requirements, techniques, and methodologies to deliver applications that are market ready. By setting up a TCoE, CxOs can achieve the objective of instilling the idea of quality within an organization and across various functions.

Helps CxOs meet business-critical objectives

With the establishment of a TCOE, businesses are able to meet important goals such as:

• High level of Quality Assurance (QA) that increases the dependability of products and enables high profit margins that lead to rapid growth of the organization as a whole
• Ability to do more with limited budget by creating a QA command center that uses standardized methodologies combined with automation and informative metrics
• Higher staff job satisfaction through greater career path opportunities, elimination of highly repetitive tasks and greater focus on higher value-added activities
• Reduced technology risks, lower chances of business disruption with technology changes, and fewer defects in production
• Reduced stress, increased staff job satisfaction, higher retention, and greater productivity
• Reduced staff costs, systems maintenance costs and increased staff efficiency
• Faster projects and on-time, on-budget execution, and more functionalities
• Proactive, consistent quality management for business-critical applications
• Reduced technology risks, and increased pace of innovation
• Fixing more defects early before they impact the business
• Maximized Return of Income (RoI) from software testing
• Established cycle of continuous process improvement
• Improved performance and quality standards overall
• Enhanced test coverage with reduced defects

Helps CxOs mitigate business concerns

Establishing a TCOE helps CxOs of organizations mitigate the following concerns:

• Business process disruption caused by a technology problem
• Project failure or lack of adoption of new technology that creates business value
• Project delay in the deployment of major systems, or delay in realizing cost savings of new technology
• Budget overruns

Conclusion

While implementing a robust TCoE can help multi-billion organizations save up to 20% automation efforts, CxOs cannot also ignore the fact that an improper implementation of TCOE may also lead to failure and costs time, money and credibility.

Thus, establishing a TCOE requires a forethought planning and necessary support. The establishment of a TCoE within an organization can be an important milestone in reflecting that organization’s progress in ensuring quality end-to-end business process execution.