User Acceptance Testing
The ultimate guide
Execution
Depending on the team’s level of skills and knowledge, it may be beneficial to have workshops before 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 of conflict with development and configuration teams.
Surveys are another way for increasing user engagement by 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
Collaboration will allow for faster access to resources as and when needed through early planning of who will do what, when and what is needed.
Things to consider
Teach the testing process you want
How to access the central system
How to access the work allocation
How to execute tasks 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.
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.
As with any testing process, not all phases need to be implemented within every project, but each should be considered to achieve the best possible outcome.
Over the coming weeks, we will cover the whole approach to UAT in a step-by-step guide. If you have just found us you can catch up here on the Overview, Scope and Strategy, Planning, Preparation and Initiation Detailled Plan
Coming up next – Triage results.
