QA: 7 Major Challenges of Successful User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

What is User Acceptance Testing (UAT)?

• UAT is final testing performed when functional, system and regression testing is completed.
• Main purpose of UAT is to validate the software against the business requirements by end users who are familiar with the business requirements.
• Alpha and beta testing are different types of acceptance testing.

7 major challenges of UAT and mitigation plan

• UAT environment setup and deployment process

• Mitigation plan

• Separate UAT environment with complete test data from production and QA environments.

• Control software version and release cycle on test environment.

• UAT test planning

• Mitigation plan

• UAT should be planned with clear acceptance test plan in requirement analysis and design phase. In strategy planning, set of real world use cases should be identified for execution.

• Testing should be carried out by prioritizing critical business objectives first. 

• UAT test plan (template) should be prepared and communicated to team well before beginning UAT. This will help them to prepare test planning, test cases, and creating UAT environment.

• Handling new business requirements as incidents/defects

• Problem

• Ambiguities in requirements get caught in UAT phase, and log it as a defect.

• Mitigation plan

• Sign off requirement.

• Change management.

• Unskilled testers or testers without business knowledge

• Problem

• Little time to train UAT staff can significantly increase the chances of UAT success.

• Mitigation plan

• Train UAT staffs who well familiar with business needs to understand new requirements.

• Improper Communication channel

• Problem

• Communication between remote development, testing and UAT team is more difficult. Email communication is often very difficult when you have an offshore tech team.

• Mitigation plan

• Proper planning and effective communication are critical to effective team collaboration.

• Use web based tool to log defects and questions. This will help to distribute work load evenly and avoid reporting duplicate issues.

• Asking functional test team to perform UAT

• Mitigation plan

• Assign UAT to dedicated and skilled testers having business knowledge.

• Blame game

• Problem

• Sometimes business users just try to find reasons to reject the software. It might be their selfdom to show how superior they are or blame the development and testing team to get respect in business team. This is very rare but happens in teams with internal politics. It’s very difficult to deal with such situations.

• Mitigation plan

• Building positive relationship with business team would definitely help to avoid blame game.

Reference: http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/successful-user-acceptance-testing