What’s common in the following scenarios?
- IBM Consulting has established a Center of Excellence specifically for Generative AI to help clients improve productivity and foster innovation
- In a 2020 Dreamforce webinar, where 300+ Salesforce program owners across North America and Europe were surveyed, 91% of those with the highest reported ROI from Salesforce had a robust CoE, establishing a strong correlation between the ROI of digital transformation and CoEs.
- Walmart’s CoE is a significant cost saver for the company and its associates while enabling affordable and quality healthcare support.
- As per a World Bank report, since 2014, the Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence (ACE) Program has helped deliver quality and relevant post-graduate education to promote employability, productivity and economic diversification.
Whether it be a corporation or government, a prominent player or an SME, building and implementing successful CoE helps organizations improve productivity, reduce costs, augment the quality of products/services, streamline processes, mitigate risks, and enhance response agility.
However such centers of excellence are often limited to engineering and technological processes. Hence, today, in this post, we will talk about how a Center of Excellence helps testing and dev organizations deliver on their promise of continuous improvement and innovation in their approach.
In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, C-suite executives understand the critical role of technology in driving business success. But technological marvels aren’t immune to flaws. Poor quality software can cripple operations, damage brand reputation, and ultimately erode your bottom line. That’s where a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) steps in, offering a strategic advantage you can pay attention to.
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Synchronizes Quality Paradigms and Testing Practices Across Testing and Dev
Fragmented testing practices across testing and dev teams lead to inconsistency in testing documentation and reports and make knowledge sharing difficult and filled with gaps. A testing center of excellence standardizes testing processes, tools and metrics across the organization, promoting consistency, improving cross-functional collaboration and simplifying knowledge sharing.
Enables Competitive Edge Through Continuous Innovation
One of the top CXO priorities for resilience and growth in the new normal is continuous improvement and innovation to stay ahead of the curve.
A testing CoE fosters a culture of experimentation and exploration of cutting-edge testing tools and techniques, enabling you to do a feasibility check, leverage the latest advancements, and contribute to developing a competitive edge in quality engineering for the organization.
Optimizes Resource Allocation and Promotes Cost-Advantage
Traditional QA approaches rely heavily on manual testing, leading to resource bottlenecks and increased costs. However, a testing CoE identifies and promotes automation usage and frees up valuable human resources for higher-cognitive tasks. Automated testing tools streamline repetitive tasks, enabling rapid execution of test cases, minimizing manual intervention and enhancing accuracy. Automated tests also have the advantage of higher reusability, providing long-term cost savings by avoiding the need to recreate tests for each release and seamless resharing across teams.
Elevates Software Testing from a Cost Center to a Profit Center
In June 2021, Orange, France’s biggest telecom operator, faced a significant software failure that led to the disruption of emergency services for hours in Paris, causing a few deaths. An internal investigation later attributed the cause to a bug in their call server software. This could have been avoided had the software been tested early and thoroughly.
QA is often seen as a reactive function, like a necessary evil that adds to costs without much strategic relevance. Testing CoE enables the shift from finding bugs later to proactively preventing them during development. By pre-emptively identifying potential issues throughout the development process, the TCoE promotes a quality culture within the organization at every level and stage. The result is saving dollars in expensive rework due to software recall, loss of revenue due to customer drop-off and security breaches.
Multiple studies by McKinsey and several others have shown that organizations that maintain or increase their RnD spend during economic downturns tend to return stronger in higher revenue, broader product range, and a more significant competitive edge. So is the case with investing and remaining invested in testing centers of excellence. The benefits accrue and compound over time. And who knows the power of compounding better than a CXO?