User Acceptance Testing

User Acceptance Testing

User acceptance testing, or UAT, is a round of testing in which the users who are expected to use the system after it goes live exercise the system. UAT differs from quality assurance, or QA, testing in a very important way: In UAT, real users attempt to use the system-in-development in a realistic manner—that is, the way they plan to use it after it goes live. In QA, technical people (who may or may not be familiar with how the system is actually going to be used in a business setting) exercise specific bits of functionality. Because of this difference in approach, UAT often exposes bugs that were not caught in QA. In addition, UAT allows users to feel confident that the system will work as they expect it to once it has been implemented, and to signal this confidence formally by signing off on the UAT.

For this assignment, you will work with your team members to build a User Acceptance Test Plan for the team project (system) you defined collaboratively in Weeks 2 and 3.

As part of this plan, you will create acceptance criteria for all user stories/scenarios associated with this project. In other words, you will collectively generate user stories/scenarios (i.e., brainstorm how users can reasonably be expected to use the system you defined) and then define each of the user stories/scenarios you list as a bug, a function not working as expected, a request for improvement, or a feature request.

To complete this assignment:

Read "Acceptance Criteria in Scrum: Explanation, Examples, and Template." (https://dzone.com/articles/acceptance-criteria-in-software-explanation-exampl)

Review the following sections of Ch. 13, "Launch and Post-Launch: UAT, Security Testing, Performance Testing, Go Live, Rollback Criteria, and Support Mode," in The Complete Software Project Manager: Mastering Technology from Planning to Launch and Beyond:

• "User Acceptance Testing: What It Is and When It Happens"
• "Controlling UAT and 'We Talked About It in a Meeting Once,' Part Deux"
• "Classifying UAT Feedback"
• "Bugs"
• "Not Working as Expected – The Trickiest Category"
• "Request for Improvement"
• "Feature Request"
• "Conflict Resolution and Final Launch List"

As a group, complete the COS sheet portion of the linked UAT Plan Template (attached). Note: Click theCOS tab that appears at the bottom of the spreadsheet to see the COS sheet. COS stands for Conditions of Satisfaction/Acceptance Criteria.

Save your collaboratively completed UAT plan template using a unique file name that does not include the string "Template".