The King Maker - A Good UAT!

There can be 100 different types of testing phases and techniques but one kind of testing whose importance will NOT go away is the User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

From my years of experience with small (under 100MD), medium (under 1000MDs), Large ( 1200 - 1500MD) & very large over 1500MD; I can can tell you that larger the project the more important the UAT.

For a good UAT, you need sufficient time & a belief that all scenarios can be thought of.

Nothing beats the knowledge of the user from day to day operations. It is always said that humans cannot think of all the possible scenarios. My claim is that we can think of so many that the miniscule number that might remain is still better than a half hearted or insufficient UAT.

How do you write all the scenarios you say?

My theory that has worked a lot. You note down all the salient rules or conditions that are required for a certain business function to work.

Once this has been done then just create all the permutations and combinations of all these factors/ conditions/ rules. And voila! these are your UAT cases.

This method also ensures that you are capturing the business function variations from start to end which is very important.

A word of caution, do not fall for the thought that this cannot happen in production. If you think that a certain scenario may not happen in production then that scenario is almost certain to occur. It is only a matter of time and your tired mind telling you Hey! this cannot happen in production.

You now have the number of test cases that are required. Now, what is required is to get Management support to execute them. From this point on, any and all ideas to make the process quicker and efficient should be considered. But what cannot be done is truncate the UAT test cases.

It may seem simple, but I have seen way too many projects where this is not followed thru. This creates a partially ready application. A huge load for the maintenance team. Every post production incident or a defect is very expensive. And can be very de-moralizing to the team.

Developing a software is a very manual job (even with collaboration of ChatGPT or other tools). A software engineer loves his work to be error free. Its just how we are!

A good UAT is his chance at greatness. A good UAT can lead to near zero post production defect. A good UAT is the project's insurance policy.

Agree? How can you make the UAT TCs more comprehensive