The Journey to Next-Level User Acceptance Testing

As we embark on our journey, it's imperative to recognize that achieving next-level UAT testing requires a clear vision of what you want your UAT environment to look like and taking a strategic, methodical approach to make it happen. By evaluating factors such as infrastructure, resources, and team capabilities we can identify potential challenges and areas for improvement in order to start crafting a plan. 

Let’s begin by asking the key questions: What and why?

What Is UAT?

The concept of user acceptance testing (UAT) is simple. In a UAT environment, living, breathing (human!) end users test the project in question, whether an accounting system website, app, or other software product. The process deploys several users and assigns rudimentary tasks to make sure all key software functions work properly and flow smoothly. UAT testing weeds out defects and bugs while empowering the user to make suggestions and tweaks to the software.

By scaling UAT testing across a diversity of users, a project manager can determine if the product is ready for prime time (i.e., ready for launch and production). With UAT, users complete the process on an individual basis—a procedure known as black box testing—to provide more accurate and less biased analysis. UAT is not just one single thing. It is a set of tools that encompass several steps and benchmarks. 

A word of caution: Although the processes work in tandem, UAT testing is not QA. In general, QA focuses on discovering bugs and more technical software mistakes. The UAT process takes a human-centric approach. The user enters the UAT environment wanting answers to questions like: What will this software do for me? How will it help me be more productive? Will it be too difficult to learn? 

It may sound a bit philosophical but: UAT testing is ultimately about bringing happiness to the user. And isn’t that the ultimate goal of software development? Happy, productive and empowered clients?

Ask an informed test manager: Any UAT project without a clearly written and articulated plan is destined to fail.

A test plan directs your testing approach, details the testing practices, and defines the responsibilities of team members. It’s a step-by-step journey.

Step 1: Determine the Need and Objective

The objective and expected outcome of any UAT project will, of course, be guided by your organization’s needs. This seems obvious but many project teams stray from the main course as the project grows and becomes more complex. Keeping an eye on the specific needs of the project will maintain your team’s direction toward true north. Of course, your UAT objective will depend on what type of testing is needed. 

UAT needs will depend on the test type. Examples may include testing a website, testing a mobile app, or testing an enterprise resource planning system (ERP). Each test will encompass a diversity of requirements, risks, test cases, and dependencies.

Perhaps you need to execute acceptance testing to validate a system is both operational and acceptable to all team members involved in terms of usability. A modern example would be a test to ensure a company’s sudden need to increase remote workers can be properly migrated and deployed using existing software. As you plan, ask yourself and team: Can we clearly describe what a successful test looks like? What does success look like after this UAT?

Step 2: Define the Approach

In order to understand what success looks like for your UAT, you must have an accurate map—The “How?” of the project. What path will best achieve the desired goal? 

This process will include defining the team—not only the makeup but the roles involved—as well as choosing the right tools (more on that in Chapter 3). 

A winning UAT project will involve creating test cases, defining requirements and risks, planning test runs, analyzing test results, managing related issues, and designing tests. Don’t forget, you will also need to make sure the entire team is on board with your testing plan and toolkit. 

Step 3: Map the Timeline

Your UAT toolkit should give you a bird’s eye view of all test runs across all timelines and should account for regression testing in addition to other legacy test cases. If Step 2 is the map, then think of Step 3 as the schedule or itinerary. It should go without saying but communicate both the approach and timeline clearly. Let’s repeat that: communicate!

Finally, as already noted, your plan must define the most comprehensive, intuitive UAT tools available. Let’s dive deeper into what those tools might be and how you can leverage them for UAT testing success!

UAT is not just one single thing. It is a set of tools that encompass several steps and benchmarks.

Risk/Requirement Management

As you continue your journey to the Land of the Perfect UAT, you must have a way of knowing if your direction is right and if there are any potholes, traffic, or dangers down the road (as noted in Chapter 2). You need a compass or GPS, i.e., risk/requirement management. UAT tools help define requirements and risks vital to your UAT testing journey, allowing you to navigate the testing project across the bumpiest of roadways.  

UAT tools like TestMonitor empower you to easily deal with large amounts of requirements and risks by organizing them into groups. Users classify requirements by using different requirement types and can easily prioritize risks with provided classifications.

In addition, a champion UAT tool makes it easy to assign one or multiple requirements or risks to test cases. The result? Relationships can be automatically adjusted and connect to test runs, test results, and issues.

As you travel down this roadway, you want the ability to filter and analyze test cases, test runs, test results, and issues based on these defined requirements and risks. That ability allows you to focus on the test results that represent the highest project risk. In addition, you then have a superior view for the risks that have the greatest impact on vital project requirements.

Test Case Management

A key tool in your UAT kit is Test Case Management (more on the details of test cases will be featured in the next chapter). 

The best UAT tools relate test cases to reusable objects while test registration tools can organize relationships of tests in a more intuitive way.

As you plan your test case, ask: “What is the goal? What data do we want to find out as a result? What are the expected outcomes?”

Some common goals for test cases include:

• Identifying defects – often seen as the primary reason to test case.
• Conformance assessment – for example, are the expected specifications operating within acceptable parameters?
• Discovering – the greatest number of bugs early to avoid deeper issues down the road.
• Mitigation of risks – for support managers (especially for “go/no-go” decisions).

Your UAT tool should provide a clear description of the test case purpose, simplifying the activity’s expected outcome. In addition, our tool allows users to define labels or tags that can be linked to test cases based on criteria such as business process, risk, requirement, or application.

Test Runs

Test runs empower a user to leverage correct cases from a test vault while also avoiding unnecessary tests. Your UAT tool kit optimizes milestones to mark important project events. Test run management tools give you a bird’s eye view of all test runs across all timelines and account for regression testing in addition to other legacy test cases. Test runs must be scalable across any relevant devices, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Finally, test runs should be able to be customized so that a user can duplicate any runs with a single click.

Results

As with any long journey, it’s important to know if the trip proved successful—did you arrive down the correct route in the proper time frame? UAT tools provide a detailed overview of test results covering every test run. Test managers can focus on specific details within each test case, as well as monitor results over time for improvement, stability, or decline.

With the proper results-based UAT tools, you will be able to view latest outcomes per test case and test run. As noted above, TestMonitor gives you powerful filters to view results per milestone, requirement, or any other metric.

An unstable, declining result can morph into an issue and must be addressed. UAT tools convert problematic results into issues (or link them to existing issues). This puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to fixing the issues and planning new tests for verification. We’ll discuss this issue more in Chapter 6.

Issues

As already noted, declining results can quickly grow into full-blown issues. However, UAT tools, such as TestMonitor, have you covered. Such tools include a simple, yet powerful, integrated issue tracker with filters, prioritization, a full audit trail, attachment handling, commenting, and task management. In short, everything you need to deal with issues.

A super-powered issues management tool resolves issues by breaking them down into manageable tasks for different users. In addition, the team is notified when tasks are completed or assigned. An added bonus is the inclusion of test-result attachments related to issues. With TestMonitor, issues can also be uploaded as attachments using drag-and-drop.

No issues management solution would be complete without a commenting function that notifies team members when a user comment populates.

Congratulations! You’ve created a dynamic, actionable plan for a game-winning UAT process. Now, the project is ready to launch into the design phase. Any attempts to take shortcuts in properly designing these modules will result in an epic, crash-and-burn catastrophe for your UAT project. Let’s take a deeper dive.  

Your team’s UAT design will optimize every aspect of manual testing—defining requirements and risks, planning test runs, analyzing test results, managing related issues and, of course, test design. 

What defines a rock-star level design? 

• Best design practices empower the team to easily reproduce the test and optimize future testing.
• Best design practices provide testers with the ability to run tests after the design phase in real-world conditions
• Best design practices leverage a UAT management tool with a clear, user-friendly organizational structure while also offering an intuitive interface. 
• Best design practices are not built upon outdated methods such as Excel spreadsheets. This can clog the process with a host of problems.
• Best design practices yield objective results about the usability and functionality of the product.

Best design practices fuel a streamlined testing process, leveraging both intuitive interfaces and a user-friendly process. Whether they’re an end user or a testing professional, your team members know immediately how to record results and understand whether or not to support their tasks with attachments and comments.

In addition, best UAT design practices generate an actionable task list of all planned test runs assigned. 

If a test case is the vehicle that drives a UAT project, then a test run would be the roadway. Test runs determine how test cases are tested, as well as when and by whom. Test runs represent the opportunity to ask questions such as: Who will test? Which cases will be driving down this specific road? 

To continue the automotive metaphor, a test run not only paves the road for the test case, but it also provides road signs and directs the case. It means your testers are ready to step into the vehicle and travel a smooth road to the final destination: UAT success. Grouping test runs into milestones allows the UAT team to acknowledge vital events in the life of the project. Your team will then be equipped to schedule sprints, releases, or iterations with organized test runs. 

As your team considers both test-case creation and test-run operation, keep the following tips in mind:

• Make sure the UAT provides a bird’s-eye view of all test runs, past and present. A UAT tool such as TestMonitor will allow you to view progress of each test run and keep track of all active and upcoming test runs, along with the assigned testers.
• If your UAT tool includes a notifications function, you’ll be able to provide constant communication to all project members, informing them of upcoming test activities and planned test runs. TestMonitor offers this feature with one click of a link.
• UAT tools must also allow the effortless duplication or rerunning of test runs. TestMonitor boasts single-click functionality to duplicate test runs and keep both testers and test cases on the right track. Test runs should be scalable across any relevant device operating system, including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.
• Editing a huge quantity of test runs should be a breeze. A world-class UAT tool will allow you to select multiple test runs and easily change scheduling by week or month, or schedule runs to expire on a specific date.