Test Center of Excellence

"Test Center of Excellence" or TCoE is the buzzword out in the market. If we try to define it in simple terms, it a centralized group responsible for the testing operations in different projects in the organization. This group has the central pool of resources which have specialized skills(Functional testing, performance testing, test management, processes etc). In other words it is a shared testing services model for the organization's testing requirements.

For example if we think about an organization's IT department which deals with applications supporting the business. In the complete life cycle of the applications there may be frequent changes coming up, or new deployments due to changes in the existing functionality or some sort of technology upgrade which required a thorough testing of the applications before they go live. If we talk about these changes there may be situations where you do not need some dedicated team to work on a single request which may be vary small or you might need multiple skills ( functional, performance or security) at the same time to test those applications. In such kind of dynamic environments it should be good idea to have a shared pool of testing resources which can cater to such kind of requests as and when they come forward. This shared pool also decreases the problem of holding resources for longer time for a particular project even if they are not used for a long time and hence improving the utilization of the resources using a centralized testing services model.

The functions in a TCoE may be different as per the needs of the organization but the underlying principle of shared testing services across the organization remains same. Following may be the main functions in a TCoE:

1. Demand Management: This is one of the central functions of TCoE since it caters to demand from different projects for the testing services. The requirements or testing requests can be divided into different categories and then can be handled accordingly. This would handle the approval, resource identification, resource allocation and closing activities.

2. Resource Management: In this section all the resource in the TCoE who are going to work for different projects. This would be handling activities like their skills and availability related issues.

3. Knowledge Management: In this section all the deliverable, assets etc which are created during the fulfillment of the demand or project are kept for the future reference.

4. Test Processes: In this section processes in testing are maintained like test planning, test estimations, metrics to be followed etc.

5. Reporting: This is one of the most important parts of the TCoE. Since it is helpful to those who are running the TCoE at the operational level as well as to the management.

Above post is as per my understanding of TCoE, comments and feedback are welcome from the readers.