What is UAT?
I am sure you have heard it before, someone in the office probably mentioned it some day. UAT, it stands for: User Acceptance Testing.
User acceptance testing (UAT) consists of a process of verifying that a solution works for the user.
User acceptance testing is greatly underestimated in startups these days. That is a big shame because it can save you so much money in the end. Like most things that are good, UAT takes time. If you do it you need to take it seriously and taking a shortcut can cost you greatly in the end.
What do you use UAT for?
You will do a UAT before you want to launch any new feature in an application. This is to make sure that what has been designed and decided on is the experience the end-user expects. The end-user should have the same experience as the product-department has envisioned at the time they were designing the feature.
A user acceptance test should, therefore, test the new functionality that is designed but also all the main functionality of the app.
UAT is not to test if what has been developed has no technical bugs because those will surface during the Technical Testing which happens before the UAT test.
Who should be involved in the User Acceptance Testing?
If you are going to do a UAT it is very important to have the right people to join that session.
The following parties should be involved:
- Product Department
- End-User – this can be
- Internal department who requested the feature.
- Your client who requested it to build.
- The real user is going to use the application or feature.
Who should be involved in the User Acceptance Testing?
Prepare you UAT properly. This means, understand what you want to test and be thorough. Include what just has been changed but also make a few happy path journeys you want to test and include the unhappy paths.
Please find below a template we are using at Sprout to do our UAT test. If you have any questions please let me know in the comments below.
