What are UAT testing best practices?

Following are User Acceptance Testing (UAT) best practices:

1. The team must analyze who will be ultimately using the product/application: The problem/needs and the motivation of the target audience for buying the product needs to be analyzed. This will help the team to save time and effort and provide specific results.

2. UAT plan should be prepared in advance: In most scenarios, UAT testing is conducted at the final phase of the software development process, just before the product is being released. At this stage, the team is focused on knowing the feedback of the product and hence planning at this final phase would result in missing some real-life use cases.

3. Assess the steps to conduct remote testing: There should be a schedule for users to test. There might be many users who may be remotely located and hence their calendar needs to be filled with the scheduled date and time for testing. For this purpose, an invitation process can be sent.

It can be quite difficult to solve the problems encountered by remote users while testing. Hence, the team must put in strategic efforts to create a plan that can help in resolving issues encountered by remote users.

4. A proper structure for communicating about bugs: The teams should focus on setting up a proper channel for communicating about bugs and thus resolving the issues quickly. The team must be as specific as possible while communicating about the bug related issues. Otherwise, there will be confusion among developers, which in turn increases triaging times.

5. User stories should be created: If the right set of users is targeted, then the UAT process can be conducted properly. If the users are as expected, then the business requirements can also be properly met. Before initiating the UAT activity, the event needs to be clearly defined to know the event for success and the event for the failure of a product during the UAT process.