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TechTarget expands on one particular dimension of the COE in detail, defining ‘How To Set Up An Automation Centre of Excellence for DevOps’, where their central recommendation is to set specific automation standards across the business, drills down to the level of detail of recommending that the organisation writes before and after job descriptions for developers and administrators and that a key function of the COE is to capture and report on metrics:
“An automation centre of excellence is an ideal clearinghouse for the automation metrics and success stories that hide inside the departments, teams and projects of mid-to-large-sized organisations.”
Similarly, writing for TechBeacon Michael Cooper offers ten tips for building a testing centre of excellence, with the keynote goal of ‘shifting left’ to focus on defect prevention and early detection.
Early involvement of QA in the software development life cycle is a proven way to consistently save your company money in the long run. Defects caught in the writing of user stories and acceptance tests can be hundreds of times less expensive than defects discovered in production.
Conclusion
The outcomes enjoyed from setting up a COE are documented in this Tricentis case study:
“Once a siloed organisation, the test engineering team is now engaged at every step in the software delivery pipeline, from inception to design to delivery. Code isn’t deployed into production without the team’s acceptance.
The team engages partners in the business to champion quality assurance principles and test engineering practices in two distinct ways: A cross-functional QA center of excellence and a community of practice. The QA Center of Excellence helps build trust and reinforce partnerships with development and business leaders as their teams move to a significantly modernised way of working.”
As partners
