The Value of UAT
When your company's IT department is big enough for a devoted QA team, the quality of your project deployment gets a big boost. However, it's easy to get complacent with a QA signoff. Your project is still as good as the UAT is at finding the functional issues. The QA testers can only go so far with exposing issues because they mainly follow predetermined test cases, which by definition cannot cover all use cases of an application. Let’s take a business process project as an example.
Business Process Example
A hospital needs to automate their patient intake process. The goal is to be able to route all inbound referrals for admission, process, and track them electronically. Each referral will be treated as a case with multiple documents associated with it.
UAT and Power Users
After the software development lifecycle has run its course is when use cases and testing become most important. The QA team has signed off on the application. Now comes UAT. The UAT folks will be real Users of the system and are not particularly invested in its success. Their acceptance has to be convinced as much as mandated. They are going to beat up the application as much as possible. Some Users are actually better than QA at finding issues. UAT Users will have to use the software for their daily processing. If I had a chance to test the design and functionality of my car, you better believe I’d find issues.
Pilot phase UAT
No matter of good your QA department is, there will always be hiccups with deploying an application to production. The best approach is to start small and gradually add more Users after a pilot or stabilization period. During this period, there will be some real issues that are identified because the seriousness of the rollout is entering everyone’s mind. Any little issues could end up compounding into large show stoppers. This is the time where all of the support operations are finalized. The fix deployment process is smoothed out as well.
When distracted managers can really pay attention
A manager cares about keeping track of the status of the individual cases, the trends in work habits, and keeping the process moving smoothly, among many other things. This data will only really show up during the piloting phase. There will be issues with the metadata and how it is being filtered and displayed on dashboards.
UAT makes the project stronger
No one wants to deal will still more bugs and issues after QA, but this is a reality. It must be embraced as a key part of successful deployment. It is therefore important to choose your UAT team carefully. These Users must be inquisitive and not afraid to demand fixes. It their process to figure out not yours.
