Volume 8 Number 2 • March/April 2007 Feature Article

Creating and Maintaining a Testing Centre of Excellence

Envisioning Excellence

Many wish for excellence, but few work for it as they are not prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.

We all from time-to-time notice leaders, business persons, celebrities, or athletes who have attained excellence. The common theme in examining their achievements is that a strong vision, a long journey, hard work, a few intermediate setbacks, and many successes were necessary to bring them to this point.

Having a centre of excellence is even more challenging than finding an individual who obtains excellence, as in a centre of excellence, a team of individuals is involved. Add teamwork, cooperation, leadership, balancing of roles, tools, budget, environment, and management support to a well-oiled team of motivated and capable individuals and you will get a centre of excellence.

Why use a team instead of a high performance coach, mentor, or consultant? Deciding to create a centre of excellence is no small decision. A centre of excellence must have sustainability, bandwidth, and consistency of service implementation. Each of these critical aspects is best supported by a team. Having a single person who takes leave, or has not got the range of skills or capacity to facilitate change programs, design improved processes, do research, monitor progress, or run meetings with key stakeholders is setting your centre of excellence up for failure. Unless you have long-term, clear goals for such a centre, and are determined to achieve these, and have the necessary resources, do not start a centre of excellence!

A Testing Centre of Excellence

A testing centre of excellence must exist independently of projects. Projects are temporal and therefore would not be able to fully support or monitor a centre of testing excellence over time. The centre of testing excellence is an important support function to IT and business stakeholders and so should support these entities while being held accountable. Because system testing is necessarily independent, it acts as an ideal intermediary between the business and IT (whether or not company personnel provide the IT).

A testing centre of excellence will operate best in companies that are mature enough to accept the challenges of attaining excellence.

For a testing centre to survive and flourish, the following environmental elements must be present:

• willingness to measure,
• change, and
• continuously improve,
• coupled with teamwork and
• respect for people.

Why a testing centre of excellence and not a software centre of excellence?

In short, a software centre of excellence might be better if it is yet to be formed. If it already exists, it may be difficult to add testing as a discipline after-the-fact. The ideal is a business centre of excellence, where software and testing excellence are mere subsets in the achievement of integrated and supported business excellence.
           
For companies with many years of IT tradition, the benefits of modern testing practice may be absent, and some companies have discovered that a good testing centre of excellence can be the glue or the central hub to improve current development practices and to unify groups that traditionally have operated in silos.

Example stakeholders include the following easy-to-recognise groups:

• projects;
• project managers;
• clients;
• business;
• developers;
• training;
• human resources;
• facilities;
• management;
• legal;
• operations;
• product teams;
• system analysts;
• testers;
• development directors;
• database administrators,
• quality assurance;
• configuration management,
• and other specialist groups.

Testing is a common theme that intersects with all these groups. A testing centre of excellence can facilitate good relationships between testers and stakeholders. Table 1 indicates the typical areas where testers and the relevant stakeholders must regularly interact.

  Table 1: Testing and Stakeholders’ Requirements for Each Stakeholder Type

 Stakeholder Grasp of Testing

Project managers, for example, must operate within company testing policies and strategies on their individual projects. They must review: test plans, test design specifications, test case specifications, test procedures, test logs, test defect logs, test reports, and test summary reports for each level of testing and each testing specialty. They must ensure each group has sufficient support and resources to carry out the required testing project tasks. From the test documentation and other communications, they must make decisions based on development quality as measured by testing and all-round progress of each team or individual. They must take management actions with respect to the results of testing, based on prioritised risk mitigation and project constraints. From this high-level overview of their testing responsibilities to the project it is clear that project managers require a good understanding of software testing as a discipline for good decision-making.

Developers, system analysts and business analysts ought to spend 20 to 30% of their day-to-day activities on testing; this is a minimum of 1.5 hours a day on average.

A Testing Centre of Excellence Requires a Good Plan, and the Execution Thereof

A testing centre of excellence can add significant value to mid-sized to large corporations. This value comes from the alignment and concentrated focus and support of testing activities across all relevant parts of the organisation. It makes sense to have a testing centre of excellence to work on and not in testing to develop the testing practice. Benefits accrue to testing, but also more surprisingly, larger benefits accrue to development efforts where rework and associated costs can be significantly reduced.

Below follows the 50 000-foot view of a plan for a testing centre of excellence.

A Plan for a Testing Centre of Excellence

Scope

• Budget, schedule, and organisation of a testing centre of excellence
• Roles and responsibilities of testing centre of excellence staff
• Communication channels between the testing centre of excellence and the organisation
• Milestones and deliverables of a testing centre of excellence
• Recruiting and developing testing staff

Establish the Need for a Testing Centre of Excellence
Establish:

• Basis and need for scientific approach to testing by training and workshops
• A business case for a testing centre of excellence
• And maintain a corporate testing vision

Establish Testing Goals and Support within the Organisation
Establish and maintain:

• Inter-departmental testing communication and reporting
• Testing policy
• Testing budgets
• Comprehensive stakeholder training plan in testing skills
• Testing strategy
• Testing standards
• Testing templates
• Testing mandates
• Testing processes for the projects, including:
• Test planning monitoring and control
• Test case design
• Test case specification
• Test procedure and script development
• Test execution and recording
• Test reporting
• Test closure activities
• Aggregate reports for reporting by the testing centre of excellence

Recruitment of Company Testing Staff

The testing contingent of a company is key to the eventual testing, and therefore IT and business success within that company. The testing centre of excellence must therefore strongly influence the human capital planning around software testers and stakeholders with key testing roles.

Targeting process

• Where and which staff to acquire

Selection process

• Evaluation
• Team role determination

• Engagement process
• Individual strengths determination
• Deployment and retention process
• Testing career plan
• Training
• Skills development plan
• Domain, testing, technology, and process skills
• Certifications, on the job continuous evaluations
• Mentored support and coaching
• Salary banding
• Job shadowing
• Job rotation
• Measured performance and performance appraisals

Termination process

• Exit interview

Maintain and support context-dependant testing needs through the organisation

• Continued support of business-justified testing improvement initiatives and campaigns

Conclusion

A Testing Centre of Excellence is a necessity in larger organisations with multiple divisions and hundreds of projects.

To be effective it should have a long-term budget and mandate, and must demonstrate measured achievement of outcomes reviewed at board level.

Used correctly it can deliver strategic cost savings, time-to-market advantages, innovation, and continuously improved quality as it captures and spreads learning within the organisation.

Wayne Mallinson
info@testfocus.co.za

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