Launching a UAT plan can be stressful, and it’s important once you’ve determined the UAT’s scope and created a strategy optimise the plan’s execution to ensure the testing can achieve the necessary results.
Depending on the team’s level of skills and knowledge, it may be beneficial to have workshops prior to executing the plan to get the team ready, understand the process, and mitigate their issues and concerns. They will need to understand how the process works and their expectations and set the standards for producing and gathering feedback.
The feedback will need to be specified to the UAT’s objective; if you are interested in understanding issues, you will need to communicate this efficiently to all participating stakeholders. Using a capture tool is essential to make the gathering of this data accurate and support the users’ experience.
Competent capturing tools should capture the inputs and screenshots against the target applications with the ability for users to add comments, feedback and issue information. UAT best practices have managers seeking feedback beyond the initial issue reports; encouraging this helps improve engagement and ownership whilst also reducing the possibility for conflict and configuration teams.
Surveys are another way for increasing user engagement providing the opportunity for a broader perspective on acceptance and readiness. It also helps highlight the differences between broadly accepted concerns against individual ones which do not have broad support. Ideally, the UAT management platform will support the concept of user surveys and sharing of the results.
It is important to train all users to ensure the success of the UAT.
Once the plan has been executed, ongoing monitoring is essential to ensure the UAT works efficiently and plan.
Whilst a full-time quality assurance team may correctly identify and raise defects, it is often preferred with users testing to distinguish between their issues raised and defects of the system, combined with a triage process to determine which issues should be promoted to defects.
Triaging results can avoid swamping development teams with incorrect or duplicated defects reports, making it easy for users to report what they find. To be effective, good evidence and audit trails of the test result is needed, and this requires complying and easy to use capture technology.
Whilst every UAT process will inevitably be different, it is important to ensure that you execute the plan with the best chance of detecting honest and accurate responses from users. Download the free Ultimate UAT guide today for a holistic overview of the UAT process and best practices for optimizing your approach.
© 2022 Original Software. All rights reserved
We are sorry to tell you that using Internet Explorer as your browser won’t give you the best experience of this website.
To get the best value visit us via Chrome, Edge or Firefox
