User Acceptance Testing

Whoever does it needs good knowledge of business processes – otherwise, the test cases won’t accurately reflect what business users do. The users themselves will know, of course, but their time is precious. If nobody else has the knowhow needed, your best option is to document business processes by monitoring and recording what users do. Once that’s done, though, you’ll still need to check that users are happy with the nature and extent of the test cases.

Other software tests are focused on whether an application works functionally – does this button work, does that menu show the right things, and so forth. UAT asks the question: “can you actually do your job with this software?” Looking at things from that angle will often reveal issues or changes that other tests would not reveal, helping you avoid releasing software that looks fine, but actually stops people doing their jobs.

Anything that helps them get through the test faster, while ensuring they still do the test right, is a winner. Look at how they give feedback – how much effort do they have to put into it? Can you capture any of that without them having to lift a finger? Can you make the way they give feedback consistent? Ideally, the user experience of UAT should be as close to doing their actual job as possible.

The only people who can do UAT effectively are the users. Temp staff aren’t familiar with your business or its processes, so there’s no way they can do the tests. It also removes the actual business users from the process, making them less receptive to software updates. If you find you need additional resources to keep things moving while users are doing UAT, then get the temps to fill in the users’ day jobs.

Sort of. A lot of what people consider UAT is technically regression testing – that is, testing all the bits of the application that haven’t changed, to make sure they still work. These can be automated. But for all the new elements of the software, automation would be very tricky to do – and, of course, you still need to answer the question of whether a human can use the software to do their job. That has to be done by a human being – but the right software can help make it faster and smoother for everyone.