Quality Assurance: The Harsh Truth About Why Projects Fail

Quality Assurance (QA) plays a crucial role in ensuring that software development projects meet the necessary standards of performance, reliability, and functionality. 

Project management and development, while organizations are focussing on building features, meeting deadlines, and ticking off project milestones many projects still fail due to the growing complexity of projects.

The harsh reality is that internal missteps even in quality assurance processes can lead to project failure. These failures aren’t just about bugs in the code; they are about systemic flaws in how projects are approached, managed, and tested. 

What Is Quality Assurance?

Quality Assurance (QA) is a critical aspect of successful project management. It is the process of identifying defects early by highlighting areas for improvement, thus,  creating a high-quality end product that meets the required standards and functions as intended. QA activities include the entire project lifecycle, from the initial stages of planning and designing to development, testing, and final deployment. 

What Is a Project Failure?

The common goal of teams in every project is to achieve a smooth and seamless execution and aim for the best outcome. However, the big question everyone wants to know the answer to during a project retrospective is why the project fails.

At times, failure happens because the project changes course due to unexpected decisions and ill-defined projects that can negatively affect all remaining work milestones. Project failures not only lead to missed opportunities and financial losses but also erode employee morale and hinder organizational growth. A project could be considered a failure when:

• It didn’t meet the objectives.
• Teams didn’t get the deliverable they wanted.
• Work wasn’t completed on time.

The Harsh Truth of Why Projects Fail

Below are the truths behind project failure.

• Lack of Proper Project Management: The harsh truth is that even a highly skilled development team can fail when project management is poor. When the PM is uninitiated, disinterested or inexperienced, it may cause unpleasant consequences: uneven workloads, poor role adjustment, and more. In short, running a project without solid management support will do more harm and less good. If the management isn’t clear from the beginning, QA will constantly be reacting to issues that could have been addressed earlier.

• Unclear Objectives: When the project goal is not defined, there is no way to measure success. Without clear objectives the team will find themselves endlessly playing catch-up, making it hard-pressed to measure performance. Not having a clear outline of the next steps will quickly put the project into chaos. 

Proper planning is the best strategy here. Having a clear picture of project goals and objectives, which includes understanding what is required and what the team needs to do from the very beginning, will keep the team aligned and provide a benchmark to measure success.

• Unorganized Documentation and Tracking: Concise project documentation and upkeep is the coordinated responsibility of the project manager and project leaders. When important documents are not kept, shared among key people, or are not easy to locate, then moving the project successfully will be hard to achieve. 

Tracking and continually reviewing tasks as milestones is the best way to know the deadlines. Keeping records and monitoring vital project information allows the project manager to identify where resources are needed to complete a project on time.

• Scope: Scope is a major cause of missed deadlines and failed projects. It is hard to spot because it often comes on slowly and causes project failure. Scope creep happens when:
  • Project deliverables exceed the project scope as work progresses. 
  • The project’s parameters weren’t specified from the beginning. 
  • When internal or external pressure is given, teams end up with more tasks that were not planned initially.

• Lack of Proper Resources: Even if a project has a good QA team, resources are anything that is needed to complete a project. It’s not just about having more testers, it’s about equipping them with the right automation tools, budget, time, testing environments, and training to do their job effectively. 

Failing to provide the required resources in place and in time is one of the biggest reasons for project failure. The harsh truth here is that the QA team cannot expect high-quality results if they don’t get the right resources or tools needed to get the job done.

• Not Involving QA Early Enough: QA is often taken as an afterthought or something that happens only at the end of the development cycle. If testing starts too late, issues will be harder and more expensive to fix. Leading the project being pushed beyond deadlines or budgets. QA starts at the beginning of testing, and during the design and development phases, QA teams can understand the product better and provide feedback before issues arise.

• Unrealistic Expectations and Time Constraints: Unrealistic deadlines or expectations have destroyed many projects, resulting in poor quality. The harsh truth is that no amount of testing can compensate for the lack of time to properly develop and verify the project. If the project timeline is too tight the QA team will get under pressure and may be forced to skip important tests or fail to do a deep dive into potential issues, hence the result will suffer.

• Failure to Adapt to Change: In rapidly changing software development environments where product design is evolving quickly, QA must be flexible and adapt to changes in scope, requirements, and technology. QA team that doesn’t keep up with these changes risks testing outdated features or assumptions. The harsh truth is that sticking to a rigid QA plan that doesn’t account for change can lead to missed issues and emerge in newer versions of the project.

• Lack of Communication Across Teams: Inadequate or poor communication between upper management, users, or other stakeholders is a leading cause of project failure. It drives misunderstandings, delays, and misaligned expectations. If teams are not working together from the outset, the chances of fundamental flaws in the project are high that testing alone cannot fix.

• Ignoring Post-Launch Issues: QA is often focused on pre-launch testing, but once the product is out, the testing stops. This ignores the fact that users will discover new issues in the real world. Post-launch monitoring and feedback loops are just as important as pre-launch QA because failure to address real-world issues quickly can tarnish the reputation of the project.

• Inexperienced Team: The QA team has great responsibility; they bring a certain level of education and experience to the project. A team with weak technical skills causes project failure. New and inexperienced project managers on board may handle projects, but they need to be the right fit for the project. An inexperienced team at times, may cause project failure.

Tips for Avoiding Project Failure

There are various new approaches and methodologies to help set a track record of success and prevent project failure.

• Leverage the best Project Management Practices: QA might focus solely on budget and deadlines, ignoring the overall project strategy. But it is not only about developing but also effectively implementing so that it brings the planned value. The proper project management strategy should be created in cooperation with the vendor to avoid misconstructions at the later stages of the project. 

• Specify Clear Roles and Responsibilities: When team member roles and responsibilities are not clear, this creates confusion, duplicative efforts, and lack of ownership and accountability, leading to project failure  The solution to this is to schedule a meeting with stakeholders at the start to confirm their responsibilities, contact information, location, and availability. Also, discuss and document their requirements on cost and product quality. This will help them know how they have to execute the tasks and meet everyone’s expectations.

• Define and Circulate the Project Scope Before Beginning: Defining the project scope in advance makes it easier to deliver results on time and within budget. Plan resourcing ahead of time, and avoid last-minute tasks as they overwhelm the team. A documented project scope with a scope statement pushes back the extra requests from stakeholders.

• Include Automated and Cloud-Based Testing: Manual testing is highly prone to human error, and without sufficient automation, testing becomes slow, error-prone, and not scalable, as testers can miss edge cases or make mistakes due to fatigue, distraction, or repetitive tasks. 

This can result in insufficient testing, delayed feedback loops, and failed projects. Therefore investing in test automation is the best possible solution. For repetitive tasks or regression testing, it ensures that each test is executed precisely the same way every time, reducing the risk of oversight. 

Use automated cloud-based testing platforms like LambdaTest, as it allows scaling tests across different browsers, devices, and environments, providing faster feedback and greater coverage. The platform also allows testing in real-world scenarios, enabling accurate capturing of the complexities of real-world use.

LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that provides testers cross browsers and cross-device testing abilities by providing access to more than 3000+ real mobile devices and environments, which include different browsers, and operating systems versions. This means testers can run a test suite on a wide range of environments with ease, without the need to maintain expensive hardware or device farms, ensuring that their web application works seamlessly.

By leveraging LambdaTest cloud infrastructure testers can also run tests in parallel across multiple browsers and devices simultaneously. This significantly reduces the testing time required for each test to be completed sequentially. Its visual UI testing, and JUnit testing feature help in quickly identifying and debugging UI discrepancies, and validating individual components or functionalities of the application in a specific environment especially across various platforms by capturing screenshots and video recordings of running tests.

Have a Clear Project Visibility- Even the best-planned project can fail if it lacks visibility. Project visibility is essential not just for the project manager, but for everyone on the project team. The project visibility helps to keep track of its status, communicate clearly, and manage documents effectively. Being aware of how each project task is progressing, everyone in the team can assist or adjust as needed, thus promoting proactive problem-solving.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the growing complexity of project development necessitates the need for consistent quality control. By embedding QA practices into a project, teams can ensure that each aspect of a project functions as intended.

However, even with robust QA processes, projects sometimes may fail or fall short of their goals. Therefore, understanding project failures, even when QA is part of the process, is essential for avoiding many pitfalls. Project failures due to poor planning, misalignment of objectives, or lack of clear communication can be avoided with well-managed projects, prior knowledge, resource planning, and awareness.