Testing Center of Excellence Clarified

Testing Center of Excellence is mostly a joke in reality

This article is one of the “IT Terminology Clarified” series.

According to Software Testing Help, A Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) is a framework that defines, implements & measures testing controls and standards across an organization. This article will clarify this phony term, in particular, from the perspective of test automation.

Some might say “our TCoE is more about manual testing”. Really? Let me list some terms that you might use multiple times a day:

• Regression Testing
• Agile (or Scrum, or Kanban)
• DevOps
• CI/CD or Continuous Testing
• Shift-Left Testing
• Release Early; Release Often

The foundation of all the above is “Test Automation”. If 80% of a TCoE’s work is not about Test Automation, it is rubbish.

Table of Contents:
· Putting ‘Excellence’ in a name does not mean Excellent at all
· Why do some CXOs believe in TCoE?
· Dissect TCoE 
  ∘ 1. Central Testing Team is generally a bad practice
  ∘ 2. Standards (across the organization)

Putting ‘Excellence’ in a name does not mean Excellent at all

Any adult would know that a person who always brags about his/her honesty or integrity, most likely, is the opposite. As an engineer, I don’t like the term “Testing Center of Excellence”. In some countries, you cannot register a company/product name with a fancy adjective + noun in a phrase structure, like these two: “Best Automation Tool” and “Highest-Winning-Ratio Lawyer”.

In reality, TCoE is a recipe for failure. It becomes a wonderland for talkers to appear busy in many rounds of useless meetings. If it is just pure time-wasting (and money), it is not too bad. Sadly, these people often introduce a process to make matters worse.

In this article (real story), a Fake ‘Senior Test Automation Engineer’ sabotaged a uni-graduate intern’s effort to set up a CT server to do real test automation. The fake senior engineer (also the TcOE lead) tried and failed to develop/maintain…