Best Practices for Executing a UAT Plan
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.
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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.
Train users
It is important to train all users to ensure the success of the UAT.
Things to consider
Teach the testing process you want
How to access the central system
How to access the work allocation
How to execute task and capture test steps
Feedback process and standards
Execute the plan and monitor
Once the plan has been executed, ongoing monitoring is essential to ensure the UAT works efficiently and plan.
Things to consider
Ensure the central system is updated.
Assess progress and rate of progress
Deal with issues and concerns
Maintain team motivation.
Ensure required results achieved
Encourage good feedback
Communicate status with business users and stakeholders.
Monitor completion rates
Monitor forecast completion.
Monitor level of issues reported.
Provide a feedback loop to users of issue status.
Triage test results
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.
Things to consider
Review feedback and issue reports.
Examine the collected evidence
Update central system with new issue status
Document and communicate defects to the product team.
Ensure the central system is updated.
Provide a feedback loop to users of issue status.
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.