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Being hardcore techie, I have been fortunate to work/lead lot of Test COE (Center of Excellence) initiatives of either improving QA Process or Designing Resualble Front end/back end Automation frameworks. Also was fortunate to help QA teams in adoption of these frameworks.

But since advancement of agile and mature implementation of test Automation frameworks to do Functional, Regression, Performance, Security testing, I feel less and less imporatance of Test COE these days. So just wanted to discuss what next things Test COE's can be done so that they can add next level values to organization ?

What is Test COE ?

  • TestCOE is center of excellence with some experienced QA with better technical skills working on creating frameworks,Processes & help in implementing this framework process in QA teams of different account in organization.

Why it is less importance now as per me ?

  • Frameworks are already implemented.
  • Processes are already matured.
  • Testers within the account are matured enough in figuring out implementing new soultion per there need if required.
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  • Could you just add details like what all things made you think it's of less important now ? And what you mean by centre of excellence
    – PDHide
    Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 15:10
  • Please check updated question.
    – Hemant Varhekar
    Commented Mar 22, 2020 at 13:08
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    All the mentioned points are organisation or process, dependent, and also misses the point that testing is context depended. I don't understand why would an organization don't need someone insight full in and skillful, to be in their agile team? Frameworks, process, tools everything should be product dependent and should be open for research and innovation. For instance, consider an organization that uses COBOL for test development, and if you believe that the framework u hav in place is matured, then it is , but its clearly visible that its time for migration 2wards more advanced languages.
    – PDHide
    Commented Mar 22, 2020 at 14:09
  • And roles like agile coach, Test COE, etc are there for guiding new projects and supporting the existing projects for major transitions. If there are no projects coming up, no new features, then even the roles of developers, testers, everything will become less important. In such a project you would be needing just 2-3 support guys who know development , and only to fix production issues.
    – PDHide
    Commented Mar 22, 2020 at 14:13
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    This question needs to focus in order to be answerable. Please read this guide to understand how to do so: sqa.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask
    – João Farias
    Commented Mar 23, 2020 at 11:21

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For 20 years now, there's been a huge gap between QA and DEV teams. Most QA people are not programmers and many don't want to become programmers. This gap has never really closed, rather it's being masked a bit; that on Agile teams today, the developers are expected to write Unit Tests on each Sprint.

Unfortunately due dates make it impossible to spend much time on testing. Big companies still rely mostly on Manual Testing by the QA team. Manual Testing as you know doesn't lag a sprint as the testers can keep up.

So in 20+ years, we've attempted to go from Manual Testing, to Automated, to Embedded and to Developers do all Unit Testing. In my opinion, the best work flow is still allowing the QA team to use manual testing techniques, just like it was done 20+ years ago.

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  • Thanks.. But my question if for a medium size organization if the QA team becomes self sufficient in using enhancing existing automation and already exploring new approaches. then what is the need for testing COE ?
    – Hemant Varhekar
    Commented Mar 24, 2020 at 14:59
  • To me, all QA coders should be a part of the dev. team working right beside them. Even the manual testers should be embedded on the dev team. You can still have a separate QA Team but they work right next to devs. If they want to call the QA Team the Center of Excellence that's their choice.
    – John Peters
    Commented Mar 24, 2020 at 17:53

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