Is your User Acceptance Testing following best practice?
“The problem is not that testing is the bottleneck. The problem is that you don’t know what’s in the bottle.”
Michael Bolton.
User acceptance testing (UAT) is an accepted and expected part of any project, be that a new install, an upgrade or a new customisation but how and when to structure this to best effect? Firstly, the nuance of UAT compared to user testing needs to be understood. User testing should involve the collaboration of the end-users from design phase and throughout the project, not just at the final hurdle, as processes may need to be changed to accommodate the new systems and this may be an iterative process alongside testing. UAT, on the other hand, is all about the word “acceptance” as it is the acceptance of a change, an update, a customisation and therefore is pretty much done at the end when the “test” is to “accept” that change.
In either instance these are critical phases in any project and their scheduling and importance should not be underestimated, nor should it be confused with end user training.
Persona
The first key stage is to identify and understand the target audience. There is little point asking your technical or project team to test an end-user system they will never use, or for the internal marketing team to test a partner or customer portal. It is imperative the intended user-persona undergoes the user testing. Also, get to know your user; what are their issues and challenges, where do they go for assistance, what is their motivation (do they need a simple report or to manipulate the data to achieve their goals?). Describing your personas at the outset of a project will help everyone in the project team identify with them and empathise with their needs.
Preparation
Although the UAT is often scheduled towards the end of a project, (to ensure they are testing the completed end-result), this needs to be properly planned and not left to the last minute when deadlines on project delivery are coming under pressure. Planning the UAT schedule is crucial and it needs to include real-life cases and have the correct time allocated as well as the “Persona” resources available.
Resources
And talking of resources, ensure your UAT resources are properly scheduled at the appropriate phases in the project. Clearly this is the job of the project manager but the whole team should buy-in to this important final mile of any project and therefore make themselves available for reporting and exception management and to make any necessary changes that are required as a result of the UAT phase.
“To tell somebody that they are wrong is called criticism.
To do so officially is called testing.”
The Right Tools for the Job
Communication is key on any project so even if the customer has what they deem to be acceptable internal collaboration tools, ensure this meets the needs of everyone in the project team as well as the UAT team. The UAT team will need a mix of team collaboration, bug tracking and validation, with easy search and filtering, comparison charts of requirements versus results, security and then efficient reporting, tracking and preferably an easy to view dashboard. The ideal UAT tech tool is one that completes the loop from requirements, actions, exceptions, collaboration and reporting.
Stakeholders
I Refer here to our recent blog on “Stakeholders” as it is useful to assign a stakeholder to the UAT phase of the project to ensure it has sufficient profile and accountability. Also, stakeholders can bring a different perspective on the testing phase; asking the difficult questions and seeing the “bigger picture”.
“Testing is an infinite process of comparing the invisible
to the ambiguous in order to avoid the unthinkable
happening to the anonymous.”
James Bach
Build the full range of Scenarios
With your Personas in place it may come naturally to them to fully test all that needs testing, (depending on the project and their skills) however, often this is not the case and you will need to build a variety of possible scenarios. For this you need to have documented what you need to know and thereby covered all the combinations and permutations that need to be tested. For the Personas, these scenarios should take the form of a story board, clearly defining all the stages and processes to ensure the testing covers all the bases.
What does Success look like?
It is almost a given that there will be issues, so you need to make that clear to the team and show them what “success looks like” so that they can work towards the % accuracy or degree of flexibility required. The team needs to understand that “Perfect” may not be achievable, but “Good Enough” may fall short – so where is the middle ground, the point at which the team have succeeded?
Finally
It is that final mile, when the pressure is on, that needs perfect planning, careful validation and an understanding of success – that is what makes a good UAT phase, at the end of a long project and let the cheers go up.
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If you have an Infor ERP project and need specialist consultants, product specialists and advisors, please drop me a message on LinkedIn; https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-heilbron/