IT teams will not tell you this secret. The developers won’t, the QA teams won’t mention it, and IT management will ignore it. That is probably because, by the time UAT comes around, they have washed their hands of it. They have moved on, and they don’t want users to find issues.
So, what’s the secret?
It is that UAT is the costliest, most expensive type of testing you will perform. More time and effort are spent on this than any other type of testing.
It involves substantial amounts of people, who are generally given little or no help, in turn, making it more expensive and less effective.
Because it does not come out of the IT budget, the cost is embedded in the business users’ inherent costs and is not noticed. Yet the business pays for it and is required to do it, and they need to do it for many reasons. It is not just cost, of course; it is also lost time, damaged customer goodwill, delayed implementations, user frustration and departmental tensions.
But with proven and easy-to-use technology, the time it takes can be more than halved, and the effectiveness in unearthing issues that threaten the operation of business systems dramatically increased. Why not look at the cost of your current UAT approach and decide if you are ready to reduce it, plus make everyone happier in the process?
