The Final Chapter of Excellence: How to Reach Your Goals

Today, we welcome backScott Summers with the final piece in his 'Testing Centre of Excellence' series. 

In this blog, I’d like to wrap up this series by providing some possible components for the scope of services that a TCOE might deliver. The scope of the Testing Centre of Excellence services should, ideally, fill the gaps in the testing and quality approach within the organisation. These can be identified through the review process I outlined in the previous blogs in this series:

How to Maximize Productivity

Today, we welcome back Scott Summers with his advice on maintaining productivity in 2020.

A question that I’m being asked a lot at the moment is “how can I maintain (or increase) the productivity of my test team when they are working from home?”. The following are a few things that I've been considering recently and hope you find them useful.

The Transition to Remote Work

Today we welcome nFocus employee, Kyla Rice with her 'Musings on Working from Home'. 

Like many of you I have found myself working from home since lockdown began in March. Fortunately, this did not fill me with dread, as I was fortunate to already have the flexibility of working from home as needed.

Is Building a Testing Centre of Excellence Worth It?

In my last post, Building a Testing Centre of Excellence, I identified the first few steps needed to create a testing centre of excellence. These are:

• Build the business case.
• Define and share your vision.
• Create the leadership team.
• Define your operating and financial model.

Now that it’s so critical to success, I’ll just reiterate one thing, the TCOE must have control of its own budget and should not be funded entirely by projects.

A Step-by-Step Guide

In my previous two blogs, I went into detail about some of the benefits of implementing a Testing Centre of Excellence (TCOE). Before you start reading, maybe take a look at the previous blogs of this series: 

• Benefits of a Testing Centre of Excellence
• Benefits of a Testing Centre of Excellence - Part 2

The benefits can be summarised as:

• Reduced costs
• Increased efficiency and consistency
• Maximised staff utilisation

Reflecting on the Value of a Testing Centre of Excellence

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.

A Testing Centre of Excellence can:

• Increase test maturity and promote innovation across the organisation
• Define, encourage and enforce best practices
• Define test policy and test strategies aligned with the business needs

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. 

My Thoughts on Increasing Test Maturity and What it Means to Me - Part 4

In my last blog 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.

My Thoughts on Increasing Test Maturity and What it Means to Me - Part 3

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.

It’s easy to assume that in an organisation that has decided to take a journey of this kind, the leadership team is behind the decision and is fully supportive of the change. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case and sometimes, dark, politically motivated forces are at work whereby a senior individual’s self-interest takes priority over that of the wider organisation. 

My Journey Towards Increasing Test Maturity

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.