This article is based on analysis originally published at cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com. It has been rewritten and expanded for a DevOps engineering audience.
The Pressure on QA in a DevOps World
Digital transformation is forcing organizations to accelerate release cycles, integrate cloud infrastructure, support mobile platforms, and derive value from analytics — all at the same time. To remain competitive, engineering teams are adopting Agile and DevOps practices to deliver software faster while keeping quality high and costs in check.
In this context, traditional software testing — a discrete phase at the end of the development lifecycle — is increasingly inadequate. The industry has responded by evolving testing into Quality Engineering and Assurance (QEA): a discipline that embeds quality checks throughout every stage of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), eliminating the bottleneck of a standalone test phase. This shift delivers faster time-to-market and meaningful reductions in both capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX).
The Rise of the Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE)
Many large organizations — particularly in retail and financial services — have established a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) or a dedicated QA Services Group. These centers exist to standardize testing practices, drive modernization, and promote the adoption of proven methodologies across business units.
TCoEs typically evolve through three recognizable stages:
- Stage 1 — Resource Fulfillment: The TCoE acts primarily as a staffing pool, supplying QA engineers to project teams on demand.
- Stage 2 — Committer Model: The TCoE shifts to optimizing resource utilization and driving enterprise-wide adoption of best practices. CoE teams operate as “Hit Squads” — small, focused groups that embed into projects to raise automation coverage, introduce service virtualization, or implement specialized testing services, before returning to a central innovation pipeline.
- Stage 3 — Innovation Hub: The TCoE acts as a technology and solution innovation center, tackling complex, cross-cutting quality problems and owning level-3 issue resolution across the organization.
The committer model (Stage 2) is the most common operating mode among organizations that have invested heavily in test automation. It is a proven approach: it contains redundancy costs, enables rapid knowledge transfer, and maintains a sustainable innovation pipeline.
The TCoE Conundrum: Contributor vs. Enabler
Here is where the problem emerges. Despite the maturity of many TCoEs, they are frequently perceived as contributors to DevOps rather than enablers of DevOps. This distinction matters enormously.
A contributor participates in a DevOps pipeline after the architecture and toolchain decisions have already been made. An enabler shapes those decisions, governs the pipeline, and drives continuous improvement across it.
Because TCoEs are underestimated in this way, organizations frequently make a costly mistake: they build a separate, independent DevOps innovation center alongside the existing TCoE rather than empowering the TCoE to take on that role. This duplication wastes investment and creates organizational silos that undermine the very collaboration DevOps is meant to foster.
This mistake is often rooted in insufficient preparation. Many organizations adopt DevOps without first assessing their Agile maturity or the readiness of their technology landscape. Skipping that groundwork leads directly to the creation of parallel structures — and more spending than is necessary to reach a mature DevOps state.
Why Multi-Vendor Environments Make This Worse
The problem intensifies in multi-vendor delivery models, where multiple development partners and QA suppliers operate within the same application landscape. In these scenarios, DevOps cannot be treated as a one-time implementation project. It must be enforced as a set of standard processes and governance practices — precisely the kind of work that a mature TCoE operating in Stage 2 or Stage 3 is already equipped to do.
Why QA CoEs Are Well-Positioned to Own DevOps Governance
There are strong structural reasons to extend DevOps responsibilities to an existing QA Center of Excellence rather than building a new team:
- Built-in quality focus: QA CoEs maintain a systemic emphasis on quality assurance that development-led DevOps teams can overlook, particularly around non-functional requirements and regression risk.
- BDD and lean SDLC integration: QA CoEs are well-placed to integrate Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) frameworks as build-time tests, enabling leaner SDLCs and tighter shift-left practices.
- Automation metrics ownership: QA CoEs typically own the metrics and tooling needed to assess end-to-end automation coverage across the organization — data that is essential for governing a DevOps pipeline.
- Shift-left expertise: Practices such as service virtualization, which reduce infrastructure dependencies in QA environments, are already within many TCoEs’ remit. This expertise can be extended to development environments, shrinking infrastructure footprint across the board.
Agile Transformation Teams vs. Empowered TCoEs
A common counterargument is that Agile Transformation teams are better suited to own the DevOps roadmap. This is sometimes true — particularly when the goal is rapid, organization-wide toolchain adoption with strong change management support. Agile Transformation teams often bring fresh perspectives and are unencumbered by legacy processes.
However, when an organization already has pockets of quality excellence and a preference for transforming existing teams rather than importing new ones, evolving the TCoE into a DevOps Innovation Center is the more effective path. It preserves institutional knowledge, avoids duplication, and gives the CoE the mandate it needs to govern toolchain decisions and enforce standards across teams.
A Practical Framework for Resolving the Conundrum
Organizations facing this decision should consider the following approach:
- Assess Agile and automation maturity first. Before standing up any DevOps structure, understand where the organization actually sits on the maturity curve. Skipping this step is a primary cause of misaligned investment.
- Audit the existing TCoE’s capabilities. Determine whether the TCoE already operates in a committer model (Stage 2). If so, the foundations for DevOps governance are already in place.
- Expand the TCoE’s mandate, not its headcount. Empower the existing CoE to govern the DevOps toolchain, own pipeline quality gates, and drive shift-left adoption — rather than creating a parallel center.
- Use Agile Transformation expertise selectively. Bring in transformation specialists for change management and toolchain evaluation, but route their outputs back through the empowered TCoE for ongoing governance.
- Enforce standards in multi-vendor contracts. In complex vendor landscapes, make DevOps governance standards — owned by the TCoE — a contractual and operational requirement, not an afterthought.
Summary
DevOps adoption does not have to mean dismantling or sidelining existing quality infrastructure. For organizations that already have a functioning Testing Center of Excellence, the most cost-effective and organizationally coherent path is to empower that TCoE to become the governance and support layer for DevOps — rather than funding a parallel innovation center that duplicates effort and creates new silos.
The TCoE conundrum is ultimately a question of organizational will: the decision to treat quality engineering not as a downstream activity, but as a strategic function capable of owning and governing the entire software delivery pipeline.