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:

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.

What is SAFe Agile Framework?

SAFe is a scaling lean and agile framework (or agile manifesto) which combines various pieces of different agile practices, principles, methodologies and core competencies such as Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean Product Development, Lean Portfolio Management and DevOps.

Why use SAFe?

Integration of Tracking, Tracing, and Testing

Today we welcome back Jane Kelly who dives into the fascinating world of Track & Trace.

Track & Trace has been heavily reported on in the news and it has made me think about some of the synergies with Software Testing. Tracking can be thought of in terms of the emerging path of what is being analysed, where its current state is, and where it is likely to end up. Like testing, tracking requires many different measures to provide value.

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

Harnessing the Power of Digital Transformation

Change is amongst us, we must embrace the new digital era and rather than see change as a challenge, reverse those views and see it as an opportunity to grow and expand. It’s a fact that Digital Transformation (DX) is at the top of every companies to do list. Whether that be a partial or full DX change, companies today are facing a dilemma; don’t change the way we work and the infrastructure we use or be left behind in a fast-changing world. Today, we face a couple of big challenges, staying ahead and on top of new technologies but at the same time provide outstanding customer experience. To be clear, DX is the process of using new or modified business processes to meet the changing business and market requirements by the use of new and advanced technology.

What Is Digital Transformation – And Where Does it Fit Into Testing?

The glib answer to the question “where does testing fit into your Digital Transformation project?” is “to get a high-quality product and the expected business outcomes, testing needs to feature highly in your digital transformation – as it does with any IT project.“

Supporting Business Objectives

You’ll be fully aware that digital transformation is at the top of every IT Directors list of things to do. Companies today are facing a couple of big challenges, staying ahead and on top of new technologies and at the same time providing outstanding customer experience. To be clear, digital transformation is the process of using new or modified business processes and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements by use of new and advanced technology.

The Top 10 Challenges When Embarking on a DX Journey

When embarking on a Digital Transformation (DX) project, you would expect a few risk items to be on your radar, but only with actual experience of DX projects does it prepare you for the reality and true extent of the challenges you expect to experience.

Defining Business as Usual in the Context of DX

The business as usual (BAU) team play a pivotal part of any Digital Transformation (DX) project. Not only do they keep the wheels turning whilst your company embarks on a digital upgrade, but also continue business essential projects whilst DX takes place. The person creating the DX Test Strategy must understand the ongoing goals of the BAU projects and be acutely aware of what is happening and when; this is to ensure and to allow the appropriate approach to be taken to capture changes to core and downstream applications before they are migrated to the new platform. Additionally, detailing the level of risk required to deliver the project to quality, time and cost should also be considered and mitigated.