The nature of User Acceptance Testing is bound to vary according to the project’s needs, the business, the users, and the overall risk. In some cases, it is the only form of testing an organization will experience, but even if it is not, UAT is the most expensive type of testing that can be performed.
Cost
Many Quality Assurance theorists and academics will be unhappy that cost is even mentioned in the context of testing. They will consider it irrelevant compared to the project’s goals and will argue this by making the comparison to the cost of not testing—a fair point. However, the cost is a real factor and a real constraint for many projects, and given that UAT is the most costly type of testing that can be performed, it is worth considering how the cost can be controlled and reduced. Thankfully, a cost reduction is a by-product of other more inspiring objectives and is achieved by efficiency, reuse, improving communication, and better testing approaches that drive out more issues in less time, with less effort.
In the end, delivering an issue-free system, which the users know how to use and gain benefit from, will be the most valuable factor in the project’s success.
The business case for investment.
This guide has been created to help identify many of the topics and considerations that should be examined to achieve the above goals. The use of technology is a recurring theme because it plays a valuable, indeed essential, part in making the improvements (compared to a manual process) to enable these goals to be achieved. In some organizations which are too IT and development-focused, testing is deemed to be only worthy of attention within the IT team, and once in the hands of the business users, it can be forgotten. Perhaps because by then, it is someone else’s budget, but the reality is that it impacts the business as a whole by increasing costs and reducing project success if not done well. The business case for investment in improving this process is usually easy when considering how much time can be saved and reducing issues that hit production systems.
No organization wants to be the next ‘Software testing failure’ headline, and UAT is a crucial component to maximize the quality of the delivered solution and stay out of the news for the wrong reasons.
We are covering the whole approach to UAT in a step-by-step guide. You can read any of the other sections here:
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