User Acceptance Testing: Why is it Important for Better Software Adoption
Tags: user, acceptance, testing
Published: 2023-03-13 07:18:53

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Organizations across the globe are moving towards cloud ERP solutions to keep pace with the ever-changing customers’ requirements, and market dynamics. Cloud ERP solutions provide them with numerous benefits such as business agility, flexibility, and scalability. Despite the numerous advantages of cloud ERP, they have a poor reputation for failing. One of the biggest reasons is poor adoption. To address challenges related to ERP adoption and change management, user acceptance testing (UAT) is considered the best solution. In this blog, we’ll discuss what UAT is, why it is important and how to perform successful UAT testing.

**What is UAT**?

Also known as end-user testing or application testing, UAT is the last phase of software testing which is executed by end users to validate that an ERP can perform necessary tasks in real-world scenarios. This type of testing ensures that ERP is ready to be deployed at production and meets the acceptance criteria of business users.

**What is the purpose of UAT**?

Executing UAT is not about cosmetic errors or spelling mistakes. Rather, it is to validate that software is operating as expected in real-world circumstances and solves the targeted problems of the end users. Alternatively, UAT provides an opportunity to end users to interact with the ERP before an official launch so that they can find out whether or not the system is supporting day-to-day functioning and is capable of business usage.

**How to perform User Acceptance Testing**?

Since you’re now aware of UAT and its importance, let’s discuss how to perform it.

**Planning**: Robust planning is considered the key to successful UAT. The right planning includes business requirements, time frames, and the use of the right testing automation platform.

**Identify the testing team**: At times, organizations involve both functional consultants and end users for UAT. However, this is a wrong practice since UAT is different from functional testing. UAT is all about testing whether the software meets the needs of end users. On the other hand, functional testing is all about the specifications of the software. If you involve functional consultants then you are again doing functional testing. In the case of UAT, you need end users who test whether the software actually works for them.

**Create test cases**: The testing team not only documents the entry and exit criteria for UAT but also identifies and creates test scenarios and test cases. They need to create test cases based on critical business processes. Test cases should be sufficient enough to cover most of the UAT scenarios. Furthermore, they need to prepare test data also while keeping privacy and security reasons in mind.

**Robust bug reporting**: For successful UAT, bugs should be reported in such a way that developers can easily understand the problem. Thus, cohesive communication between testers and developers should be facilitated. While reporting bugs, testers need to include as much information as possible. Thus, it is recommended that you should bring in a robust UAT testing tool that can record or take screenshots to send bug reports to the development team.

**Confirm business objectives meet**: Once UAT is done after retesting of bugs, the testing team needs to send a sign-off mail, stating that a product is good to go for production. However, before doing it, make sure that

- No critical defects are open

- End user’s requirements are satisfied

- UAT Sign off meeting with all stakeholders