User acceptance testing
UAT in the spotlight: meaning and business benefits
Before software goes live, how do companies ensure it works for end users? That’s where user acceptance testing (UAT) comes in, a dress rehearsal for a big show.
While traditional QA verifies proper software operation and high performance, UAT tests how well the system fits real-world business needs.
Performed before the release, it involves key stakeholders or an unbiased testing team validating every aspect of the software and ensuring its alignment with business objectives.
Reduced post-deployment risks
By enabling stakeholders and third-party QA experts to take the system for a spin, UAT helps uncover problems that earlier tests might have missed.
Addressed business demands
With UAT, project teams can prevent gaps between business workflows and software capabilities, confirming the system truly meets user needs.
Lowered costs
By conducting UAT, project teams can identify and fix issues before the software’s release, thus preventing significant financial setbacks from downtime and costly repairs.
Simplified decision-making for software release
By running UAT, companies obtain valuable feedback on whether the software is ready for further deployment or if there’s still some fine-tuning to do.
Our tailored approach to UAT
We align testing strategies with your operational workflows, validate software functioning in real-world conditions, and help you confirm that your IT products meet technical and business objectives before their deployment. Our UAT process includes the following specific steps:
1. Communicate with stakeholders
We begin by engaging key stakeholders to gather in-depth business requirements and functional goals. This includes in-depth discussions to understand business workflows, end-user expectations, and operational challenges. By aligning the UAT phase with real-world scenarios, we ensure that testing accurately reflects how users will interact with the system.
2. Define business use cases and acceptance criteria (AC)
We leverage stakeholder input to define clear AC where needed, ensuring their alignment with business objectives. Our approach involves creating detailed, real-user scenarios that accurately simulate actual software usage, covering both routine user flows and mission-critical processes.
3. Create test cases
We create well-structured and clear test cases, focused on business goals and AC, while ensuring they mirror how users will engage with the system in their daily activities.
4. Execute tests
We conduct thorough user acceptance testing and work closely with business users to ensure the software is fully user-ready and aligned with business objectives before going live. This approach guarantees that the system meets both functional and user experience requirements and addresses real-world scenarios and business needs for a seamless deployment.
5. Confirm release readiness
We ensure that all critical issues are identified, addressed, and validated before seeking final approval. a1qa works closely with stakeholders to ensure that the system works effectively in live conditions. Through structured reporting and transparent communication, we provide them with the insights needed to make informed decisions. Once formal sign-off is obtained, we certify that the system is ready for deployment, confident of its stability and performance.
What our clients say
Specific UAT challenges to consider
While UAT brings significant benefits, it also comes with its own setbacks, including:
Defect prioritization conflicts
When defects are considered minor from a functionality standpoint but are critical for a business, failing to address them on time can lead to release delays for project teams.
Mismatch between test and production data
If UAT relies on artificial test data, some business scenarios might fail in production, resulting in undetected data-dependent defects, misleading performance results, failed regulatory audits, and overall problems with user experience.
Poorly setup test environment
Unrealistic testing conditions can cause invalid results and undetected defects because certain issues only surface in production-specific settings.
New requirements from stakeholders
If businesses introduce new requirements for an upcoming release without accounting for the time needed to properly test them, the chances of failure increase significantly.
Why companies turn to external QA providers
Limited resources
If internal development teams struggle to dedicate time to UAT due to being overburdened with tasks, companies risk facing delays in the release of new features, costly post-production defects, or poor end-user reviews.
Vague acceptance criteria
Without clear acceptance criteria, developers, testers, and stakeholders can have different interpretations of what “done” means, leading to confusion, business processes gaps, ineffective decision-making, and missing software functionality.
Overlooking key business scenarios
When internal teams have been engaged in a project for a long time, they may develop assumptions about how things should work. As a result, they can miss gaps, unexpected user behaviors, or key business requirements, which can impact the system’s overall operation.
Unclear ownership and accountability
If it’s not clear who is responsible for certain aspects of UAT (test cases, scenarios, team coordination, etc.), project members risk delays and inefficiencies, leading to gaps in test coverage, unresolved defects, and a lack of coordinated decision-making, which impacts overall software quality.
Communication issues
In case of poor interaction between project members, teams can fail to test all critical scenarios, leading to test coverage gaps and further rework at higher costs.
Lack of expertise
Absence of specialized skills in verifying business processes from a user perspective necessary for UAT can lead to overall ineffective testing and compromised software quality.
Why a1qa?
Smart scalability
We can quickly ramp our QA teams up or down upon our clients’ requests to support constantly evolving project workload without business disruptions.
Wide expertise
We’ve successfully completed 30+ UAT projects across 10+ industries, so we know how to handle challenges, requirements, and process specifics unique to each field.
Global regulations
We are ISO 9001/27001/14001 certified and align our work with these standards to ensure high standards of quality, security, and environmental responsibility, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Competent talents
We provide QA engineers, managers, and architects with the necessary level of technical proficiency to successfully handle tasks of any complexity.
Advanced techniques
We embrace shift-left, continuous, Agile, and DevOps testing to create efficient QA processes, ensuring faster issue detection, seamless integration, and superior software reliability.