Running User Acceptance Testing

You are working for an organisation and are told one day that you will be doing User Acceptance Testing on a new system being brought in for your operations. What do you do?

You may consider, and reject, several possibilities such as:

• Panic - however this does not do your health any good.
• Say it is not your job - but you will be using the system after it is delivered.
• Claim you are too busy - but you will still have to use the system after it is delivered.

Finally you will have to accept that you need to do it yourself, as efficiently and effectively as possible. Because after delivery, it is your responsibility.

So the question remains, what do you do?

UAT Test Plan Template

One of the key ways of improving the chances of a successful UAT project is to have a good test plan in place. The IEEE 829 document standard outlines the sixteen key sections that should be in any test plan. Available from this site is a customised UAT Plan Template which uses the standard and makes it specific for UAT. You can check the details or if you wish buy it now for the February 2010 price of £4.99.

Skills Needed for UAT

The UAT process requires a number of skills. The good news is that many people tasked with performing UAT find they have similar skills already from the job they do. What they need to do is to see how they can be effectively applied.

This site has several resources to help organisations run effective User Acceptance Testing and provide these skills. These include some free information on this website, the UAT Test Plan Template, as well as the on-site UAT course suitable for groups of up to ten people.

Recent revised articles for 2010 are:

• Legacy System Integration deals with the strategic issues involved in integrating different systems from different organisations.
• Document Management Software Definitions defines a number of common abbreviations for document management software.
• Testing Process steps outlines the six steps involved in running a testing process.
• Performance Testing - explains Performance Testing and the match against non-functional requirements.

Give yourself and your colleagues the confidence to understand what has to be done in accepting a new system into your organisation by contacting me, Phil Coley.