Quality Assurance and Testing Challenges in Software Projects
In my experience in the software engineering field, testing plays a crucial role, but it is often overlooked by customers. During project negotiations, if testing timelines are included in the proposal, clients frequently try to minimize or remove them. However, once they perform User Acceptance Testing (UAT) or Quality Control (QC), they question the poor quality of the delivery. If I try to plan the delivery timeline with sufficient testing in mind, clients usually reject it. Yet, when bugs surface during UAT, they become highly vocal, asking why such issues exist. As a project manager, what can I do if the client does not allow proper testing time but still expects a high-quality product?
In my team, I always try to ensure functional testing. However, aligning testers with business requirements is quite challenging. Manual testing is tedious, especially in long workflows, and testers often become bored with testing every delivery cycle. Nonetheless, it’s necessary to test the full workflow to ensure quality.
Developers work on different modules or features, but it’s hard to align their output with testers’ requirements. In the end, the project manager often has to step in to ensure the testing is aligned with the project features, as testers sometimes claim they were not properly aligned with the requirements.
In agile development, where feedback from the customer is integrated continuously, the initial requirements documents often become outdated as the project evolves. Customers provide feedback on development iterations, but aligning these changes with the testers is difficult. When the testers are not up to date with these evolving features, the project manager must step in to ensure proper testing before delivery.
Over time, testers remain focused on the initial documented requirements and often fall behind on changes made through continuous development and client feedback. As different developers implement features incrementally, testers lose domain or feature knowledge, which makes it harder for them to deliver meaningful test coverage.
We are now introducing automated testing, but a recurring issue is the testers’ mindset. Many testers focus only on the “happy path” (ideal scenarios) and fail to explore edge cases or attempt to break the system. They worry that finding bugs early will invalidate their workflow, so they tend to avoid rigorous testing. As a result, simple bugs are discovered by the client, leading to customer dissatisfaction.
I have also worked with many experienced test engineers, and I’ve noticed that when clients report bugs, these testers often shift responsibility to the developers rather than reproducing the issue or taking ownership. This lack of accountability creates additional friction in the project.
I believe the root cause lies in poor alignment between the client and the testing process. We don’t emphasize enough to clients or business stakeholders that thorough testing requires significant time if they want a high-quality product. Additionally, testing teams need to be proactive in keeping up with evolving business domains and feature changes during agile development. Without this alignment, ensuring both a smooth project and quality delivery becomes very difficult.