Team conflicts? Scope creep? Tight resources? Welcome to a day in the life of a software project manager (PM). PMs juggle team members, reporting, velocity, and expectations, and as the point of contact between development and stakeholders, often hold the bag for project success.
However, when PMs adopt a QAOps model, pain points across the software development life cycle (SDLC) can be alleviated, enabling success in planning and delivery by streamlining processes, improving communication, and enabling continuous testing and feedback.
Here's how QAOps addresses seven common PM pain points:
1. Unclear objectives and poorly defined scope
Example: A retail company is developing a custom e-commerce platform with the goal of allowing users to purchase items, view their shopping history, and manage their profiles. The original project scope includes a shopping cart, payment gateway integration, and user account management.
As the project progresses, stakeholders request new features, such as custom reporting for analytics, or mobile app integration. This increases technical complexity, extends timelines, causes budget overruns, and decreases focus on core functionality. Expanding scope also contributes to team burnout by forced changes of context and unplanned pivots in work and strategy.
By embedding quality checks early, QAOps quickly catches deviations, preventing scope creep and unplanned feature expansions. The QAOps model promotes cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that developers, testers, and stakeholders are aligned on goals and can adjust scope when needed with data-backed insights.
2. Poor stakeholder involvement
Non-technical executive or clients stakeholders may not understand SDLC technology. These players may see their role as secondary, or feel that they don't need to be actively involved after hand off to a development team. This can lead to gaps in feedback during development, and can result in software that doesn't meet stakeholder expectations.
QAOps Solution: Continuous integration of QA practices provides real-time visibility into the product’s quality and progress, making it easier for stakeholders to be engaged. Dashboards and reporting tools provide stakeholders with an open window into a project, enabling their involvement during development. These tools also reduce the risk of miscommunication.
3. Lack of team buy-in and alignment
There are several reasons for team resistance — burnout, unclear objectives, forced context changes — but unhappy teams are a fact of life for PMs.
QAOps Solution: QAOps fosters an environment of collaboration between developers, QA teams, and operations. A continuous testing environment with ongoing feedback, promotes team member accountability and keeps team members on the same page, promoting buy-in and alignment throughout the SDLC.
4. Inadequate resources
When planning a project, non-technical stakeholders may under-estimate required resources. Resource needs may increase if objectives change.
QAOps Solution: By automating repetitive QA tasks, QAOps frees up resources, allowing teams to focus on more strategic and value-driven activities. Project managers can better allocate resources based on real-time data on team capacity and testing coverage.
5. Unrealistic deadlines
Whether it’s due to lack of technical understanding, scope creep, or pressure to meet business goals, stakeholders may set unrealistic delivery timelines.
QAOps Solution: Continuous testing ensures that teams identifies issues early, preventing bottlenecks later in the process. With real-time insights into progress and quality, project managers can better estimate timelines and adjust planning based on actual performance metrics.
6. Unforeseen challenges, a.k.a. unwelcome surprises
Imagine that throughout the project development stages, unit and functional testing are performed as usual. During early development, testing with small datasets shows everything is working as expected. However, when the application is tested with a larger, realistic dataset in the final stages, performance issues such as slow response times or crashing under high load are discovered. These unexpected results can lead to missed deadlines or costly last-minute code refactoring and optimization.
QAOps Solution: Continuous, thorough testing coupled with good test planning and a sound strategy can improve project stability and prevent performance surprises. This helps reduce late state conflicts that disrupt delivery timelines.
7. Team burnout
There are several factors that contribute to developer team burnout. Unrealistic deadlines add to stress and impact creative innovation. Poor communication, inadequate feedback, or misaligned goals can frustrate and demotivate the team.
QAOps Solution: QAOps is about planning and minimizing surprises. A QAOps-focused team will have dedicated communication channels for information handoff — this reduces frustrating and/or unproductive meetings. Automated testing in QAOps reduces repetitive tasks, allowing teams to focus on strategic testing and balanced workloads, which helps prevent burnout. Engineers are freed up to focus on innovation.
By fostering collaboration between QA and development, QAOps eliminates bottlenecks and last-minute delays. Continuous QA integration ensures consistent code quality, minimizing rework and late-stage defects, while early issue detection prevents deadline pressure and exhaustion.
By providing real-time reporting, continuous testing, and automated processes, a QAOps model gives project managers visibility into progress, reducing uncertainties and unexpected issues. With early issue detection and data-driven insights, managers can modify project plans while maintaining quality control. Automation eases workloads, allowing for better resource allocation and ensuring team availability, helping managers feel in control and prepared.
QAOps fosters cross-functional collaboration, enhancing team cohesion by aligning developers, testers, and operations on shared goals. By implementing efficient, transparent processes, project managers earn respect and maintain confidence in their team’s ability to deliver quality work on time. Continuous testing and regular feedback also help manage customer and stakeholder expectations.
Contact OnPath to learn about the benefits of introducing a QAOps model into your project.