Hybrid Testing Centers Of Excellence

As outsourcing increasingly becomes a regular occurrence in today's software quality assurance (SQA) organizations, application development pros are wondering how to combine technical expertise and process maturity with sufficient business process knowledge. Outsourced testing can handle technical acumen and process maturity, but does the vendor really understand your business? Testing centers of excellence (TCOEs) have many advantages — most notably a dedicated testing center that can standardize and accelerate key processes to reduce testing cycles. However, TCOEs don't automatically have intimate knowledge of business process or culture that can affect the day-to-day success or failure of an application. To combat this, Forrester advocates adding a wrinkle to the mix: a hybrid model leveraging internal intellectual property and domain or business experience to guide the test strategy along with outsourced testing expertise. A hybrid model can bring the best of both worlds: increased focus and speed to the testing cycle, higher confidence in testing from technical and business perspectives, and foundations for term-test efficiencies.