Best Practices for User Acceptance Testing

One of the most crucial steps in System Development Life Cycle ( SDLC) is User Acceptance Testing ( UAT), a type of system and business objective validation, performed by the end users, and business objective sign off by the project owner; not to be confused with System Testing which is performed by the Ivanti Developer and/or ISM Administrator

Many Ivanti Service Manager implementations fall short when it comes to proper UAT Testing, be it due to a lack of resources, time, or budget, but more often than not due to a shortcoming of proper UAT Action Plan, UAT Test Cases and Scripts and a lack of Best Practices, Strategy, Coordination, and Planning.

Today we shall focus on Ivanti Best Practices for UAT.

UAT Best Practices

• Daily Stand-Up Calls coordinated by the decision maker and UAT Test Lead with the UAT Test Team
• Review of UAT Decision Tree
• Review Test Results, questions, unexpected behaviour, workarounds, tester comments
• Review Reference Data to-do list for PROD
• Identify key areas for training (bullet points)
• Test Case Maintenance — identify new test cases or changes needed to existing test cases
• Daily Email Summary to the ISM Consultant, bullet points, of areas that need to be addressed, identifying “show-stoppers” and “must-haves”, “questions”
• Scribe — Appoint a person to take meeting notes, and keep track of any “nice-to-haves”, “parking lot items”, “knowledge articles” needed. Typically this function falls on the Knowledge Manager/Trainer.
• Weekly Calls with ISM Consultant to review the progress, test results, and discuss UAT remediation scope.
• Focus on Job Functions, not features, not enhancements, not future phases.
• No Bug Hunts — The point of UAT is not to find bugs. It’s to ensure day-to-day functions can be carried out and the steps for those job functions are documented for training purposes. Any unexpected behaviour can be recorded in tester comments.
• Keep it Simple — Focus on test cases at hand. If there are any issues, make sure to record the reference #, 1 or 2 screenshots, bullet point tester comments, no need for long novels with pages of screenshots.

Originally published at https://bestpractice.systems on September 24, 2020.