Table of Content
Key business users that help plan and execute User Acceptance Testing (UAT) are probably the least motivated testers. UAT is rarely high up on their list of priorities, which typically includes business domain responsibilities and deliverables on top of testing. As professionals, they were not contracted or trained to test. Moreover, they sometimes have no technical aptitude and find the testing process overly technical and tedious.
Low user buy-in means testing (and release) delays. What can you do to win key users’ attention? The key to incentivizing your users is making testing the easiest task on their long list of to-dos’. While this may sound like science fiction, you’d be surprised at how much easier testing can be with the right management tool.
These 3 shortcuts will make their testing life so much easier and help them help you. Here are just a few examples from our latest eBook User Acceptance Testing: Simplified
Planning UAT: Capture & Package Business Know-How in Record-and-Play Test Scripts
Slavery has been abolished a long time ago. Why make your testers work hard? What needs to be tested is the million (sometimes more) dollar question. Too much and you’re out of time. Too little – you’re risking too much. Asking your users to do this over and over again, for every new feature is like dropping them into a Groundhog Day time loop. Instead, with no additional effort required by testers, the right testing management solution can automatically record tests for documentation, and play them back for script creation. This frees up the key user from the responsibility of tedious documentation and business knowledge transfer while ensuring full testing coverage.
UAT Execution: Remove Idle Time and Relieve Bottlenecks
To your key users, UAT workflows often feel like running a blindfold relay race. Passing the baton has so many dependencies, which users are blind to. Still, they must wait their turn in a waterfall-type workflow. This is everything but agile. Enable your key users the benefit of executing their steps without dependencies, even in a multi-step, multi-tester business process. Do this with embedded workflow automation features like ‘Time to Test’ notification when it’s a user’s turn to test within the business process, ‘Retest’ notification to UAT testers upon defect resolution and ‘Close’ notification to developers upon retest success.
UAT Evaluation: Accelerate Defect Management with Built-In Collaboration Tools
Globally dispersed key users are bound to have time-zone and communication issues that would make their whole testing experience even more excruciating than it normally is. Instead, to reduce waste of time on back and forth communication between testing and development teams, the right management tool would automatically attach the steps to reproduce the error at the time of defect creation. Also, when a defect is found, the right management tool would automatically identify all other tests affected by it and block or send warnings to testers until the main defect is resolved.
The Bottom Line: Simplify UAT for UAT testers
Your key business users have so much on their plate. The last thing they need is a non-core, painstaking, manual task that requires detailed communication with other departments, i.e, testing. There’s good news too, though. Making your key users’ lives easier is easy – with the right testing management tool. This eBook outlines the top 5 counterproductive UAT practices and how you can simplify them to gain user adoption and execute UAT cycles faster and safer.
