Today we welcome back our popular guest author, Renée Elizabeth Mineart.

It has taken me a considerable amount of time to get my head around this topic. I’m not sure, even now as I place fingertips to keyboard, it is the right direction for this blog. But I think it’s an important topic to cover and is perhaps not talked about often enough. So, I ask you to please, bear with me as we broach the murky waters of … (queue dramatic music) … Project Failure. 

In my last post I discussed how a Testing Centre of Excellence can reduce cost and create efficiency in an organisation. In this post I will discuss some of the other benefits of a TCOE.

What is a Testing Centre of Excellence?
A Testing Centre of Excellence (TCOE) can be many different things with different objectives and its scale and reach will vary from company to company. Generally speaking, it’s an internal organisation that provides various testing and testing related services to its internal customers. Although internal, it can be set up and delivered by a third-party external organisation. The TCOE can be onshore or offshore and geographically dispersed but, by definition, will always be managed centrally. 

Today we welcome back our popular guest author, Renée Elizabeth Mineart. 

I realised this week that I have a character flaw. Probably, one of many, if I’m being honest, but let’s just focus on the one for now.

In my last post, I shared the steps I go through to understand what an organisation is trying to achieve through testing and how their current testing model is being implemented. In this, the final blog in the series on increasing test maturity, I want to discuss how I get to the end goal of a mature test model that does what it needs to do.

This blog is the third in a little series where I write about my thoughts on increasing test maturity. Previously, I went into a bit of detail on the importance of wining the hearts and minds of the various stakeholders impacted by the change in approach.

In my last post I wrote about winning the hearts and minds of those people affected by the operational and organisational change that’s needed to increase test maturity. I discussed the emotional and psychological impact of change and how, in my experience, the behaviour of those people impacted by the change but who don’t support it, tends to follow the model proposed by Kübler-Ross. This model was originally hypothesised to recognise the series of emotions experienced by terminally ill patients after being told of their prognosis but has more recently been adopted by the change management community.

The thing I most enjoy about my job as a Test and QA consultant is delivering organisational change. This usually involves increasing test maturity and I’ve been extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to do this kind of work with many clients - from multinational investment banks and utility suppliers to small software houses. Delivering organisational change allows me to be creative, operate on a macro scale, influence decisions and work with people on an emotional level. This is very different to, and is a refreshing change from, the regular testing, test planning and test management that is the bread and butter of a test consultant. I find it fun, interesting and challenging.

I hope you don’t mind if I divert slightly from the topics of User Acceptance Testing, Sprint Cycles and other software testing subjects, to discuss the very important topic of keeping up morale while in lockdown (a.k.a. being a bit silly).

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is a vital step in the successful release of any new software. But why; why is this one stage so important?