Overview:

Testing in medium to large organisations is becoming increasingly complex and challenging. Shorter development lifecycles and new development methodologies coupled with rapidly multiplying platforms and a demand for constant updates and renewal is putting a real strain on legacy testing teams. In many organisations testing groups have evolved to cope with demand rather than being designed to deliver quality results. Too often companies are relying on hard work, experience and luck rather than planning and executing tests in an appropriate and focused way. With increasing demands these systems grow to be more inefficient, unreliable, costly and can ultimately become a serious risk to the business.

So how are organisations meeting this challenge head on? The answer is by developing and growing Test Centres of Excellence (CoE). A Test CoE is a professional service organisation that delivers testing services to the IT group and the business. It comprises a dedicated and independently managed team of people with a core competency in testing, operational processes to support testing for the enterprise and supporting tools and technologies.

This Seminar aims to give a tour through the what, why and how of centres of excellence:

     What is a centre of excellence?

What does a CoE look like?

What problems do they aim to solve?

What are the key stages in a Test CoE Program?

     Why are organisations interested?

What are the drivers of change?

What are the benefits and challenges?

     How do we go about implementing them?  

How and what processes are redesigned?

How is the CoE Supported by the business?

How does the test function need to change internally?

How does the organisation need to change to support a test CoE?

How do we measure success?

Bio:

David Cass

David is a Senior Manager in Strategy and Operations Consulting for Deloitte Ireland with over 9 years experience in software testing, test programme management, test strategy development and organisational change. David specialises in developing organisational test strategies, end to end quality assurance and test organisation planning & optimisation for large organisations. This includes the development and roll-out of test centres of excellence, testing shared services and outsourcing strategies, test tool specification and selection and developing strategies for managed test services. David has recently completed a 12 month program to design and develop a test centre of excellence for a large Irish retail bank.