From legacy to leading-edge: Why testing centers of excellence are making a comeback

In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, testing centers of excellence (TCoEs) are experiencing a revival. Once seen as artifacts of the waterfall era, modern TCoEs are emerging as indispensable hubs for driving quality, collaboration, and innovation in Agile and DevOps environments. This resurgence stems from their ability to centralize standards and unify distributed teams while supporting the rapid iteration that modern delivery demands.

But what makes a TCoE “modern,” and why are some of the world’s leading organizations re-establishing them? Here, we explore three key qualities of a modern TCoE and how it can serve as the cornerstone for achieving speed and quality in an era defined by continuous testing and emerging technologies like AI.

Read the eBook: Redefining the testing center of excellence in the age of Agile, DevOps, and AI

A quick look back at the TCoE

The concept of the TCoE gained traction in the early 2010s when waterfall was the dominant methodology. As Agile took center stage, organizations moved away from centralized structures like TCoEs, prioritizing embedded teams and rapid iteration. However, this decentralization often introduced silos, leading to inefficiencies, duplicate efforts, and inconsistent quality standards.

Today, modern TCoEs are making a comeback — not as rigid gatekeepers, but as enablers of unified quality practices that complement Agile and DevOps workflows. By balancing standardization with flexibility, they provide the governance and insights needed to meet the demands of continuous delivery.

The TCoE of today

At Tricentis, we’ve seen many of our large enterprise customers implement or reinstate a more modern version of yesterday’s TCoE. Often when our customers look to implement a more structured test automation strategy, instituting a TCoE system helps them maintain standard best practices, unified visibility, and a holistic approach to org-wide quality.

As Tricentis’ Senior Solution Architect Simon Norrington shared in a recent webinar, “By consolidating testing resources and tools and also expertise within a centralized, kind of center of excellence, organizations can of course achieve economies of scale.” Hear more of his insights by watching the full webinar: Building a modern testing center of excellence.

For example, Wolters Kluwer, a large global organization with 6,000 members of their digital experience team across the globe, recently reinstated a testing center of excellence to centralize quality engineering best practices, using Tricentis qTest as the central source of truth. The result was 100% automation for UI and API test cases on 200+ core platform applications.

According to Paul Digrazia, Wolters Kluwer’s Vice President of Quality Engineering, “We’re about driving quality and innovating, not just from the technology perspective, but also the process perspective in new different ways and challenging ourselves to rethink how we view quality in one consistent, unified mindset.” Here are some of the qualities we’ve seen most consistently across today’s successful TCoEs:

1) Standardization of process and technology: Standardization is the backbone of any effective TCoE. By establishing consistent processes for tool selection, test case design, and reporting, organizations can eliminate redundancies, reduce errors, and improve efficiency. Centralized standards make it easier to implement changes and share assets across teams, enabling faster feedback loops and a more cohesive quality strategy.

• For instance, unified protocols for issue tracking and resolution ensure developers receive consistent feedback, ultimately enhancing both speed and quality across projects.

2) Flexibility (with guardrails): Modern TCoEs embrace flexibility, empowering teams to choose the tools that best fit their needs while providing clear guidelines to avoid chaos. By maintaining a curated list of recommended tools and offering a pathway for approving new ones, TCoEs ensure that innovation thrives without sacrificing consistency.

• For example, when testers at a financial services firm needed new tools, their TCoE provided both recommendations and a process for adding bespoke tools to the approved stack. This approach allowed for shared access to test assets across the organization, maximizing reuse and minimizing wasted effort.

3) Organization-wide quality visibility: Centralized reporting is a hallmark of the modern TCoE. By maintaining a unified system of record for test assets and metrics, TCoEs provide a “single pane of glass” view into quality across the organization. This transparency enables better decision-making, from assessing release readiness to identifying areas for optimization.

• For instance, a central dashboard tracking automation rates, defect trends, and CI/CD integration can help teams fine-tune their processes while ensuring that critical metrics are aligned with high-level business goals.

Unlock the full potential of your TCoE

Want to dive deeper into the evolution of TCoEs and learn how to implement one in your organization? Download our eBook: Redefining the testing center of excellence in the age of Agile, DevOps, and AI today and discover how a modern TCoE can help you balance speed and quality in an ever-changing software landscape.