How to Prepare For User Acceptance Testing?

This is a 4-part series on User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

• Part 1: What is User Acceptance Testing and its Best Practices
• Part 2: How to Prepare for User Acceptance Testing?
• Part 3: User Acceptance Testing Challenges & UAT Environment Examples
• Part 4: UAT Checklist

Ensuring that the appropriate solution is delivered to the users is the ultimate goal of every test engineer. In this post, we are going to discuss various stages of user acceptance testing and some tips you can use while preparing for UAT.

Tips to Prepare for User Acceptance Testing

• Prepare and set up the right environment: To to carry out accurate performance testing, the first and foremost requirement is to have a production-like test environment.
• Plan your test: Once done, it is crucial to design a clear test acceptance plan during the design and the requirement analysis phase as it helps to reduce pressure to meet deadlines.
• Train the UAT staff adequately: Another important way to prepare for UAT is to train the testers adequately on the developed business requirements as it can help increase the success of UAT significantly.
• Set up the right communication channel: UAT is a process that involves seamless collaboration between various teams, including the development team, the QA team, and the UAT team. It is, therefore, important to have a proper communication channel between these teams to ensure the success of UAT, especially when all these teams are working remotely.‍
• Do not involve the functional testing team: Functional testers are not equipped enough to conduct UAT, and they may not test all real-world scenarios. This can less to end-users finding several issues when the software is in final production.

What are the Stages of Acceptance Testing?

Among the key stages of user acceptance testing are-

Planning phase

The stage involves assigning a dedicated UAT test manager to oversee the end-to-end process of UAT. The main objective of this stage is to outline proper planning and execution strategy along with identification of important resources and preparation of a powerful resource plan.

Preparation of UAT test data and test environment

This stage ensures UAT readiness as the UAT test environment is set up along with preparation of test management with test data, interfaces, authorization, and scenario readiness.

UAT test scheduling and management

The phase marks preparing proper action plans along with UAT priorities. During this stage, a triage process is also kept in place to prioritize the assessments of defects blocking, if any. Apart from this, an effective mechanism to effortlessly track test scenarios/ test scripts based on the requirements defined is also taken up at this stage.

Testing execution and defect management

An important phase of UAT, here the key goal is to take up proper identification of priority defects with more focus being placed on performing root cause analysis assessments. Apart from this, the stage also marks a trial run of UAT processes to validate execution and defects assignment.

UAT sign-off and reporting

This is the last stage of UAT that involves testing of accurate defect, status reports as well as defect report generation from the test management system. Once done, a sign-off when all bugs have been fixed indicates the acceptance of the software. The idea here is to validate that the application being developed meets the user requirements and is ready for production.

Now that you are familiar with what is user acceptance testing, UAT best practices, and how to prepare for user acceptance testing let's explore some of the typical challenges faced during user acceptance testing.