What Undermines Accurate Project Estimation: Part 2

At Aries, we love creating custom solutions. However, we know true impact starts with a solid foundation of accurate project estimation. Too often, post-launch essentials like thorough Quality Assurance (QA) testing as well as customer service and site operations support aren’t included in early estimates.

With years of experience guiding enterprise digital transformations, Aries Solutions and commercetools understand what’s frequently missed and how to avoid surprises that derail timelines and budgets. This two-part list highlights the most commonly forgotten elements that are necessary to deliver a complete, functional solution. Read through our first part here to get caught up!

Successfully managing development gates starts with clearly defining what “dev complete” means across an organization. While it’s easy to think of a Product Detail Page (PDP) as simply building components, connecting product data, and enabling basic functionality like adding to cart or displaying reviews, true completion involves much more. Teams must consider how these elements are factored into the development process.

Organizational standards, like performance goals from Lighthouse scores or accessibility audits, need to be incorporated early in the development cycle. Ultimately, success comes from defining strong, detailed requirements at the outset – like how to handle negative scenarios or service outages – and holding teams accountable to those standards. By doing so, organizations can avoid many of the common “gotchas” that arise when key performance and user experience criteria are treated as afterthoughts.

During project planning, it’s common to estimate development time based on how long it will take to implement a change. It is often assumed that testing can begin immediately after, and QA teams will “figure it out” on the fly. However, this approach often overlooks a critical gap: the setup and preparation required for thorough QA testing.

While a developer might resolve a ticket with a simple configuration change in a day, QA engineers may need significantly more time to validate that change. Setting up testing environments, creating specific test accounts, preparing data for both positive and negative scenarios, and performing regression testing are all time-consuming yet worthwhile steps. These efforts are essential to ensure confidence in the change, even if the code itself was a quick fix.

Environment Preparation & Clean-Up

Project plans tend to overlook two QA testing phases: environment preparation and cleanup. Considering teams often reuse existing QA environments, the time and effort required to automate environment setup should be accounted for. Proper setup makes sure deployments function correctly, data loads successfully, and CI/CD pipelines work as intended. This includes writing scripts to create and load test data or migrate sanitized production data, especially when Personally Identifiable Information (PII) must be handled carefully.

Equally neglected is the need for environment cleanup after testing. Without cleanup scripts, test environments can become cluttered with outdated or sensitive data, which can interfere with retesting and future reuse. Proper planning should include estimating the effort for both initializing and cleaning environments.

Failure Handling

Many project teams fail to account for the reality that tests rarely pass on the first attempt. Allocating time for handling failures and rollback procedures is therefore important. When a test or deployment fails, teams need a clear plan for diagnosing the issue, cleaning up affected environments, and resetting systems for retesting.

Effective planning should include time for successive rounds of testing, starting with a small subset to validate core mechanisms, ensure data accuracy, and secure approval from business stakeholders before scaling up. Tests should be designed to support an iterative ramp-up of virtual users, allowing for early issue detection and gradual confidence building.

From both a business and technical perspective, this approach is essential. With platforms like commercetools, it’s also important to account for environment scaling. Gradually ramping up virtual users helps avoid sudden spikes that can lead to cold start issues or system failures. This requires deliberate effort to build and test environments capable of supporting incremental load increases.

Many teams assume a site works fine if it looks good and functions with a mouse on a typical desktop. Very few people test for experiences without a mouse, such as using only a keyboard or navigating with a screen reader. These scenarios represent a small percentage of users, so they’re frequently deprioritized, especially during replatforming projects where the focus is on features that drive revenue.

Despite the small user base, neglecting accessibility can carry major legal and ethical consequences. Many countries now have regulations requiring accessible digital experiences, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Accessible Canada Act (ACA), and European Accessibility Act. Most of these incorporate guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which is a good place to start. Failing to meet these guidelines can lead to expensive lawsuits.Beyond compliance, there’s also a moral imperative: even basic accessibility steps like adding image alt text can significantly improve the user experience for those with disabilities. With tools like AI now capable of automating parts of this process, there’s little excuse not to include accessibility in every project.

Security and performance testing, such as penetration and load testing, are widely recognized as best practices before launching a site. Yet they’re rarely built into project timelines.

Security Testing

Many organizations, especially smaller ones, often forget about the importance of implementing Application Performance Monitoring (APM) before launch. APM is vital not just for performance insights, but also for debugging and security. Without it, understanding time series metrics, third-party call behavior (like those to commercetools), and diagnosing issues becomes extremely difficult. Teams should also collaborate with vendors to clarify security requirements, such as SOC compliance, penetration testing processes, and audit documentation to ensure a secure foundation.

In addition to performance monitoring and security, comprehensive QA planning must consider the broader ecosystem. Many commerce platforms rely on multiple third-party vendors (ISVs). Failures often occur when companies test just one part of the system without validating the capacity and stability of integrated services. For example, a retailer testing high-traffic events like daily deals may run into a critical failure due to a queueing system crashing mid-test. Understanding and accounting for these dependencies across the stack is essential to avoid incomplete or misleading test results.

Performance Tuning

Performance tuning and load testing are closely linked, especially in composable architectures where multiple services interact. A proper load test helps identify bottlenecks, like a slow CMS or external service. Even a basic two-day testing window can uncover major weaknesses and give teams the opportunity to fix them. In complex systems, one slow component can bring down the entire experience, making these tests essential for a smooth, stable launch.

Leveraging MACH services helps ensure good performance, but it is not a silver bullet. It is still important to use these services correctly. Clean code and proper queries can make a huge impact.

QA testing should be embedded throughout the project lifecycle. The focus on quality requires extra time to ensure reliability, especially in a composable environment where solutions are highly customized and there’s no out-of-the-box template to rely on. Failing to allocate time for proper testing can delay launches or reduce the quality of the final release. This highlights the need for a more realistic and integrated approach to estimating both development and testing timelines.

When implementing or updating composable commerce platforms, much of the focus tends to center on the customer’s purchasing journey: how they browse, buy, and check out. However, a fundamental component of this is the customer service teams that support those buyers. These internal users deal with everything from checkout issues to post-purchase needs (e.g., “Where is my order?”). Despite playing a key role in shaping the customer’s experience, they are frequently an afterthought in the project.

Teams should thoroughly document current support processes, including templates, scripts, KPIs, and performance metrics, so they can be replicated or improved in the new system. As customer service staff adjust to new tools, it’s expected that metrics such as time-to-first-action or resolution may initially decline. Proper documentation allows teams to track these changes and validate performance as they ramp up on the new platform.

Equally important is allocating time for training and change management. Customer service teams need to understand the new platform, including any pain points or significant differences from the legacy system. Migration offers a valuable opportunity to rethink outdated workflows rather than simply replicating them. For example, teams might leverage custom views in the commercetools Merchant Center or build tailored apps to improve efficiency and reduce long-term costs. Embracing this mindset helps unlock the full potential of the new system.

While automation and chatbots can support some customer service functions, customers still want human help. Your customer support team needs tools to quickly access order data, resolve issues, and appease customers. Real-time chat with human service representatives is one of the most commonly used support channels, so it is important to give your customer service team effective tools and access to the right data.

Site Operators are responsible for ensuring the site runs smoothly on a day-to-day basis. These teams manage everything from products, content, categories, pricing, and promotions. Their workflows often rely on existing tools built around the legacy platform, so transitioning to a new system requires new tools or integrating the existing ones. Operational changes also require new processes and new training. If these needs aren’t accounted for early, it can result in last-minute project delays, poor launch readiness, or a sudden operational burden that stretches teams thin and reduces efficiency.

While deadlines are important, it’s also a priority to communicate that issues can and do arise, and clearly outline how teams plan to adjust. Setting realistic expectations helps maintain trust and reduces pressure when things don’t go as planned. Being open and transparent with clients fosters collaboration and results in more effective problem-solving.

Accurate project estimation doesn’t stifle innovation, it empowers it. Testing and migration processes should be viewed as long-term investments rather than one-off efforts. By building reusable frameworks for data migration, cleansing, and validation, teams can make future initiatives easier and avoid reinventing the wheel. This mindset not only improves efficiency over time but also maximizes the value of initial work, turning what might seem like sunk costs into scalable, strategic assets.

Aries Solutions and commercetools combine visionary thinking with composable commerce expertise to build flexible platforms tailored to your goals. Connect with our teams to explore how we can help you lay the groundwork for a smarter digital solution.