The UAT process is an essential factor in the software choosing and developing state to detect issues and defects with the system, but it also provides commercial benefits through increased efficiency. By detecting system defects and issues before committing to the change, you can determine whether the software is safe, usable, and meet the changing system’s core objectives.
In an ideal testing process, the tests will have been developed to provide 100% coverage of the areas and scenarios needing testing. These will all have been executed correctly and passed, even if the process has undergone several cycles.
At the same time, users will not have significant questions or concerns and will have provided positive feedback about the software’s quality and readiness. Upon completing this, all shareholders will have agreed that the changes will positively impact the organisation and achieve project goals.
Reaching this position is largely dependent on the factors previously considered and implemented before this point; however, you will also need clarity of the project metrics to determine when this project status is approaching or arrives.
This data will need to have been collected as the project has progressed and cannot be realistically constructed in retrospect, so it needs to be reinforced in the management platform and methods from the start.
Assess overall status and readiness
Once the test has concluded, we recommend following these 6 steps:
- What are the test passes against failures? Any outstanding tests?
- Are there any outstanding issues?
- Are there any outstanding defects?
- Has there been progress made against key metrics?
- Assess the state of the surveys and content and review accordingly
- Automation build strategy
Automation of tests can be extremely useful for UAT. It provides the most value in areas that have already ‘passed’ user inspection but will need retesting or re-execution either as part of a subsequent cycle in this project or a future release cycle where it forms the basis of regression testing. Automation can also provide value in data loading to support testing activities.
Whilst manual testing is essential for successful UAT, having users repeatedly test the same software will eventually lead to less accurate results from users becoming tired of repeating the same hypothetical task over and over again. However, if automated, UAT managers can still validate and accept the results without users repeating tests and still gain valuable test assets for future use.
To be successful, automation will need to be relatively easy to create, maintain and understand. By delegating some repetitive aspects of the testing scope to automation time, users’ time is freed up substantially. Through planning for automation at the start of the testing process, this freed-up time can be redirected to exploratory testing.
The UAT process’s initial responses need to be reviewed and analysed to assess their validity and how to provide an understanding to the testing manager and other stakeholders of how the testing process is going and help determine the next steps of the testing process, including automation and retesting.
The reviewing and management stage of the process is only one factor in achieving successful UAT. Original Software’s free Ultimate UAT Guide explores the process as a whole and how to optimize the testing process for successful results efficiently.
Things to consider
- Can past manual tests be converted to automation?
- Where is the greatest gain?
- Is the process knowledge available, captured?
- What future requirements for regression testing can be addressed now?
- Consider intensive, repetitive manual tests or tasks (such as data loading) for early automation.
- Ensure you have selected an automation solution to match team skills and rate of progress.
- Are there configuration and environment tasks that will need to be repeated when moved to production, captured in automation for consistency?
The UAT process’s initial responses need to be reviewed and analysed to assess their validity and how to provide an understanding to the testing manager and other stakeholders of how the testing process is going and helps determine the next steps of the testing process, including automation and retesting.
The reviewing and management stage of the process is only one factor in achieving successful UAT. Original Software’s free Ultimate UAT Guide explores the process as a whole and how to optimize the testing process for successful results efficiently.
