What is the biggest challenge in UAT (User Acceptance testing)?

A full form of uat is User acceptance testing and it focuses on testing a product from a business and user’s standpoint. This testing method plays a crucial role in ascertaining the value of a product from a user’s perspective, because users/customers will be using the product after it is released. Hence, the feedback, opinions, reviews and suggestions provided by users are gathered by the team and then analyzed in order to further improve the quality of the product. In this article, you will get to know some of the key challenges in user acceptance testing.

Following are some of the key challenges in User Acceptance Testing (UAT):

1. Considering self-paced testing or in-person testing: Conducting UAT depends on where the team members are located geographically and whether there is a requirement for multiple shifts of tests. If teams are co-located within a specific geographical area, then a particular testing environment can be setup and then a united UAT software testing format can be managed.

On the contrary, if teams and resources are available at different time zones and thus are not able to conduct testing within a specific timeframe, then self-paced testing can be a better option. Based on the team and the time zones, self-paced testing or in-person testing can be conducted.

2. The testing environment: Real world use cases will be overlooked, if UAT is conducted in the same environment that is used by the software functional test team. Also, significant testing activities like performance testing cannot be performed with incomplete test data on a software test environment. For conducting UAT, a separate production like setup needs to be arranged.

The release cycle needs to be controlled effectively once the software test environment is separated from the UAT environment.

1. Test planning is done inappropriately: Right in the requirement analysis and design phase, a clear UAT plan should be planned. For the purpose of execution, identifying a set of real world use cases is considered to be important. The test objectives for UAT should be properly defined because test execution for complex or large software is not possible in the UAT phase. Crucial business objectives should be prioritized first in order to carry out effective testing.
2. The issue with communication: There might be problems arising because of improper communication between the testing team, UAT team and technical team, especially if they are located at different geographical locations. For onsite and offshore communication, if teams rely on email communication, then a lot of delays can be expected for even a small issue in the software requirements.

Thus, the assigned teams must put in strategic efforts to come up with a streamlined communication channel in order to carry out UAT effectively and without any communication-related issues. The team can use specific collaboration tools to log defects and write down notes.

5. Inadequate responsibility by users/customers: Due to some users’ being unavailable and the busy schedule of the customers, there might be scenarios where customers will give the responsibility to the functional team to carry out user acceptance testing.

This in turn leads to poor performance of UAT and the real world scenarios being ignored. User’s perspective is the prime criterion for effective UAT and functional testing team cannot replace end-users. What might happen is that when the software is released, the users will pin point the issues in the software, which will in turn prove to be really difficult for the testing and development team.

Fixing software defects post release will consume more amount of time and costs will also be on the higher side. Hence, it would always be a wise move to give the responsibility of UAT to end-users, who can carry out the entire testing activity in a justifiable manner.

Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing UAT for your specific project, then do get connected with a leading software testing services company that will provide you with a feasible testing solution that is in line with your project specific requirements.

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