The question: Many organizations have created Testing Centers of Excellence. Is there a place for this in Agile or is this approach counter to the intimate nature of Agile?
My answer: COE's usually are staffing pools, where the pool manager focuses on skill development, and sends/assigns the skilled staff out to the dev teams. In this regard, the test person from the COE simply joins the dev team.
Sometimes, a COE is in the workflow of the project; in this scenario, the release package goes through the COE for some kind of validation testing before release to production.
Of course, agile is not a complete methodology if the field is not green; integration/UAT testing with the existing product base often is handled in a traditional sequence, post-agile development. The COE could be responsible for this last testing step.
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