What is User Acceptance Testing in Agile?
The final stage of the software testing process is UAT or user acceptance testing. End-users or clients often undertake it to decide whether an application or feature serves its goal. Before the software may be distributed to the public, UAT must be completed. User Acceptance Testing is often the final phase of the software development life cycle in the Waterfall methodology. In Agile software teams, however, user acceptability testing is performed for each iteration of working software.
A process to check whether the system accepts a user's requirements. Click to explore about our, User Acceptance Testing Tools and Checklist
User Acceptance Testing checks whether the product suits the end user. It has other names like end-user testing, operations, application, beta testing, or validation, but they describe the same thing. In quality assurance, it is essential to distinguish validation from validation. Validation refers to an overall quality assurance process designed to test the technical aspects of a product to ensure that it works. Validation is performed to ensure that the product meets business requirements and is usable by end users.
Why to perform UAT?
The Agile Manifesto is the authoritative guide to the sprint-based software development strategy, emphasizing the necessity of first putting the customer. Indeed, the manifesto declares, "Our primary aim is to please the client through timely and continual supply of valuable software."
The primary purpose of acceptance testing is to verify that the product meets user needs (defined during the product discovery phase) and is ready for release. According to Origsoft's UAT usage survey, more than 75% of respondents said they run multiple end-user testing cycles, and 57% cited poor product quality.
Taking the effort to use UAT and validate software at any level of development can give additional benefits. User Acceptance Testing is capable of the following:
- Increase customer and developer collaboration to build a complete solution that fulfills all needs.
- Increase the quantity and kind of possible faults discovered using a fresh tester viewpoint.
- Allow your team to get the benefits of agile without jeopardizing the development process.
Unit testing operates on a low level and is tightly coupled with source code. Taken From Article, Golang Unit Testing
How to perform User Acceptance Testing in Agile?
There are six phases to performing Agile user acceptability testing. They are as follows:
Examine the business requirements
It is critical to comprehend your software's business and functional needs. For example, if a business needs clients to be able to pay using several methods, the functional requirement is to set up multiple payment gateways. Analyzing these criteria will reveal what must be tested.
Create a UAT plan
The UAT plan specifies the Agile User Acceptance Testing strategy. It specifies the entrance and exit criteria, test scenarios/cases, and testing durations.
Identify test scenarios and test cases
Test scenarios are hypothetical circumstances that your users may experience when interacting with your software, and test cases are designed to assist testers through potential difficulties. A test case, on the other hand, is a collection of specified activities conducted to test a given feature or capability. Your examination of the business requirements yields both test scenarios and test cases.
Choose your testing team
Real-world users, subject matter experts, stakeholders, product owners, or consumers are frequently recruited from your current user base. Test scenarios and test cases must be properly stated for the testers.
Run tests and record the results
The testers execute the test scenarios and test cases. Bugs are tracked and re-tested once they have been resolved. Data from user reports can give further information about the run test cases.
Sign off
Once the team has resolved the concerns raised by UAT, the testing team confirms that the program has been accepted. This signifies that the product has been tested and is ready for release.
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What are the Agile UAT Best Practices?
Although agile development is well-known for its short, focused periods of design and development, another advantage of this technique is the structure it provides to teams. Typically, each sprint comprises, among other things, identifying a goal, scoping the work through user stories, and validating the pace and capacity.
Teams may use some of the following agile UAT best practices to help smooth this process and solve the issues stated above:
- Set expectations for integrating User Acceptance Testing into sprints before starting the project, including the agile UAT process's objective, schedule, key actors, and advantages.
- Identify user acceptance testers who can assist with product evaluation throughout the development lifecycle and represent each stakeholder group.
- Use a test management platform that simplifies and personalizes designing tests, logging results, and interacting with testers.
- Ensure user-focused stories are integrated into agile development sprints and updated as the project changes.
What are the challenges to integrating UAT into an Agile Workflow?
Although UAT has various advantages during any development strategy, teams must overcome certain hurdles.
When doing User Acceptance Testing, it might be challenging to:
- Determine the best level and approach for communicating and coordinating with UAT testers while keeping the agile process moving.
- Create complete user stories that correctly depict end-user demands for testing.
- Determine the best time and environment for UAT during agile sprints.
- Determine an easy way to document acceptance and how flaws are weaved into the next sprints.
- Reduce the administrative load on Scrum Masters and QA specialists when setting up and managing tests.
Conclusion
The difficulties and pleasures of producing a product that ends customers appreciate are tough to equal, no matter how long you have been a software developer or QA expert. Fortunately, development tools have grown with the software development profession. Developers now have additional tools to reduce the risks and obstacles of their employment. Test management tools like TestMonitor, which are meant to help teams produce safe, reliable, and bug-free software, are among the most diverse and powerful.
- Click to explore the Software Quality Management Techniques
- Read more about Continuous Load Testing Tools and Features
