Centres of Excellence, or Competency or Capability Centres as they are also called, are increasingly being used by organisations to focus a team with a particular set of competencies or capabilities in a particular function, to lead and support best practice to drive business and customer value.

In the Software Quality Assurance and Testing area, these are referred to as Test Centres of Excellence (TCoE) or Quality Centres of Excellence (QCoE). Centres of Excellence have certain characteristics:

• Defined and managed best practice frameworks
• A skilled, dedicated core team
• Career paths, professional development and performance management
• Flexible resource pools often with third-party partners
• Integrated toolset to support and enable best practice
• Reusable assets and accelerators
• Test environment management
• Metrics and Service Levels
• Innovation and continuous improvement

QCoE and TCoE in a Modern World

The development of a Centre of Excellence for Testing/Quality is often a significant part of the overall software quality journey for an organisation.  A CoE may be a clearly demonstrable output or objective of a programme and can act as a focus for consolidating, standardising or streamlining the overall software quality operating model in an organisation.  All this is done to achieve better quality more economically.  The Metisure© framework provides comprehensive support for the development of a QCoE/TCoE