User Acceptance Testing

Learn About User Acceptance Testing

• User Acceptance Testing is end-user testing performed in a sadbox or test environment to confirm a project or enhancement works as intended, and that what was originally requested is what is actually being delivered.
  • Commonly this is under a Salesforce Business Analyst’s purview
    
    
• Business Analysts are the liason between business and IT teams - their role is to create clarity, and to bring people and technology together to create good solutions
• What is UAT?
  • Last stage before “go-live,” typically completed in a Sandbox after the technology team (including a QA team) vets the work
  • Testing can involve a variety of types of test cases and stakeholders, including business users, end users, BAs, IT teams, etc
  • Result is generally pass or fail, go or no-go
  • Goal of UAT is to ensure that what was requested is what was delivered, and the new functionnality is ready to be used by the business
• What’s involved in UAT?
  • Preparation and planning for the test cases is the most important part of UAT. BAs should consider:
    • Who is doing the testing?
    • What are you going to test?
  • This is also the time when you really put “fingers to keyboard” to test out the new system
  • Big, big part of UAT is getting official UAT signoff
• What is a BA’s role in UAT?
  • Business Analysts liaison between business and tech - their role is to drive clarity and quality in these projects
    • UAT is a key part of driving that quality - it ensures that the business teams' expectations are being met
  • BA will be in chart of identifying the UAT testers, lead and coordinate UAT, write the UAT test scripts, define testers and approvers, receives official written signoff
    • Once official written signoff is received, the team can deploy
• Why should a BA be involved in UAT?
  • Business Analysts understand the function and intention of the new functionality
    • If you chase the project upstream, BAs have usually been involved in the requiremennts elicitation. So, they have the most context and therefore best sense of what the business users are expecting
• UAT Best Practices
  1. Tons of prep leads to the best UAT outcome
     • Identifying resources
     • Set of cadence of status updates
     • UAT schedule
     • Need a kickoff/daily standup?
     • Establish a process
     • Create test cases and steps
     • Identifying sandbox
     • Schedule a roundup meeting at end of UAT
  2. Ensure test cases are complete and comprehensive
     • Test scripts should be reflective of real life
  3. Testers should be familiar with the role they are testing for
  4. Nightmare scenario is that business users sign off on UAT and the functionality is moved to production, but then a bunch of deficiencies are discovered
     
     
• User acceptance testing is implemented as the last step before production release
• The BA’s role in user acceptance testing is to prepare for and guide UAT through completion