To many organizations, an external test center—also known as a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE)—sounds like an investment that’s hard to justify. The numbers tell a different story. Barely 28% of companies currently have one in operation, and fewer than half of those consider it effective. But where a testing center is running smoothly, organizations report up to 62% fewer defects reaching production and 38% lower testing costs.
A concrete example from an insurance company with 600 engineers illustrates the scale: production incidents fell from 15 to 4 per month (-73%), customer-impacting outages fell by more than 75%, automation coverage rose from an average of 45% to 78% organization-wide, and tool costs fell by 43% (from $2.8 million to $1.6 million). New employees were up and running within 2 to 3 weeks instead of 3 to 4 months, and an investment of 1.4 million euros yielded a return of 4.4 million euros.
A central team of 4 to 8 FTEs, with an annual budget ranging from 800,000 to 1.5 million euros for an organization with 200 to 500 employees, is a common benchmark.
Moreover, the role of such a test center is shifting: rather than simply adding more and more testers, it is increasingly becoming the guardian of the quality standards on which AI-generated tests are based. Gartner predicts that by 2028, AI-powered testing tools will be integrated into the development pipeline at 70% of companies, up from just 20% in early 2025.
M2Q’s External Test Center services are specifically designed to address this trend. Would you like to learn more during a free consultation?
