Project Risk
Project risk is the possibility that events or conditions may negatively affect the successful completion of a software project.
“A risk that impacts project success.”
(Definition reproduced from the ISTQB Glossary. Copyright belongs to ISTQB.)
View the complete ISTQB GlossaryWhat is Project Risk?
Project risks include schedule delays, budget overruns, resource shortages, technical challenges, or organizational issues that threaten project objectives.
Project management focus: Risks affect project execution rather than product quality.
Planning support: Risks influence schedules and resource allocation.
Continuous monitoring: Risks should be reviewed throughout the project.
Real World Example
A team building a new e-commerce checkout feature is confident in the quality of its code, but three weeks before the deadline, the third-party payment gateway vendor announces a delay in providing the sandbox environment needed for testing.
The team spent all its planning attention on product risks like input validation and calculation edge cases, and never identified or tracked this kind of Project risk — a delay outside the team's own code — leaving no contingency plan when the vendor's access genuinely didn't arrive on time.
The test manager starts explicitly tracking Project risks alongside product risks: key personnel availability, third-party vendor dependencies, environment readiness, and schedule pressure, assigning a contingency plan for each before it becomes a crisis.
On the next release, when a similar vendor delay occurs, the team switches to a pre-planned mock gateway fallback within a day instead of losing three weeks — because this time the Project risk had been identified and planned for in advance.
Practice Questions
Question 1
A team is confident in the quality of their checkout feature's code, but a third-party payment gateway vendor delays providing the sandbox environment needed for testing, threatening the deadline. What type of risk is this?
Question 2
Which of the following is the BEST example of a project risk, as opposed to a product risk?
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