UAT: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Do It?

Serena Gray
3 min readAug 17, 2020

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The consumer is the client who hired you to build them a software product or the consumer of the applications you are going to be selling to, and an acceptance means agreement or approval. So it follows that the definition of user acceptance testing is, “Software testing done with the client or user to establish whether it is approved for launch or never.”

UAT is typically the very last evaluation software undergoes following integration testing, end-to-end testing, and any kind of testing required for the specific software product. The purpose of UAT? To confirm your software meets business requirements and user requirements.

When you execute functional tests (which are usually undertaken by quality assurance engineers), you affirm the software against operational specs. These are specifications that nobody outside of developers completely knows or cares about. But just because the software functions properly does not mean it will be well-received or appreciated by its intended audience. Particular business requirements and procedures are only understood by clients or users; that is why consumer acceptance testing is so important.

Developers have a tendency to develop tunnel vision when working on precisely the exact same program for long periods of time and can not evaluate and assess everything, particularly the front-facing side of applications. The other issue UAT solves is post-release bugs, errors, or bad user experience.

These bugs may not appear in different evaluations but they might become apparent in the program layout or flow of features. Fixing these defects before the software is released will reduce the first negative feelings or testimonials of your software.

What’s the User Acceptance Testing Process?

There is a particular procedure all computer software goes through in consumer acceptance testing.

Different DevOps teams will have slightly different processes, but we will provide you an overall 5-step procedure that many teams broadly follow.

  • Planning
  • Execution
  • Documentation
  • Assessment
  • Reporting

Let us dig into each one at a time.

The very first step in the user acceptance testing process is planning.

First, launch your UAT schedule as well as the QA agents and testers you’re likely to want for the length of this job. A valuable exercise is to draft an idea of what your testing group should look like and work off of that. Then sit down and determine who exactly will be involved in the implementation of UAT, such as their roles and responsibilities. Once that’s done, deliver your UAT staff together to be certain everybody understands their responsibilities, establish communication guidelines that are clear, and prep them for testing.

Throughout the UAT process, it’s important to adhere to a specific workflow so that you can effectively manage errors, bugs, and other flaws or issues. So beforehand, settle on the way you are going to record problems and how testers will communicate the problems you need to be recorded.

There are a number of ways you can take care of the execution of UAT. 1 way is to bring the testers to your facility and have them perform the testing there. But if you are selling the software to end-users around the globe, then you likely won’t have the ability to satisfy your testers in person.

In that case, run one-on-one sessions together through Skype or Zoom or some other online telecom software. This will provide you with tons of quantitative and qualitative data from users.

You’ll discover insights that you have never believed, you’ll get a better comprehension of how savvy your end consumer is already, and you’re going to be better positioned to change or tweak all the necessary aspects of your applications to ensure it is excellent.

While implementing UAT, you should also be documenting your progress.

Make sure whatever you use permits you to record bugs, user opinions, abnormalities, and some other major observations.

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Serena Gray
Serena Gray

Written by Serena Gray

I work as a Senior Testing Specialist at TestingXperts. I am a testing professional accustomed to working in a complex, project-based environment.

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