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.

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

How hard can it be? Well hiring a Test Manager is simple - right? Well they all pretty much look the same, have the same key points on their CV and have all ticked 80% of the boxes for what you are looking for but that just complicates the process in reality.

So by now you would have realised that projects run using waterfall methodologies are from the Triassic period and Agile is the new kid on the block and here to stay (well for the next six months at least..). And, the traditional role of a Test Manager seems no more, almost extinct like the Tyrannosaurs. But wait, just because testers are working in collaboration with the project teams and reporting, estimating and planning directly with them doesn’t mean the Test Management role is dead as a Dodo, no far from it.