Recently a new director of my department came in and expressed his wish that we become a "center of excellence". I expected that since he is my first boss who actually has a programming background that there would be some description of this. However, it was left at that.

As I reflected on this over the last few days, I am coming up empty on what a CoE actually means beyond just "being effective" at delivering the product. Here are the main items I am struggling with:

1. Is this just a term that is thrown around by management types?

2. What qualities make a group of software developers and testers excellent?

3. How do you measure excellence in this context?