The user’s role in acceptance testing begins with the user making the determination as to whether acceptance testing will or will not occur. If the totality of user’s needs have been incorporated into the software requirements, then the software testers should test to assure those needs are met in unit, integration, and system testing.
If acceptance testing is to occur the user has primary responsibility for planning and conducting acceptance testing. This assumes that the users have the necessary testing competency to develop and execute an acceptance test plan.
If the user does not have the needed competency to develop and execute an acceptance test plan the user will need to acquire that competency from other organizational units or out source the activity. Normally, the IT organization’s software testers would assist the user in the acceptance testing process if additional competency is needed.
The users will have the following minimum roles in acceptance testing:
1) Defining acceptance criteria in a testable format
2) Providing the use cases that will be used in acceptance testing
3) Training user personnel in using the new software system
4) Providing the necessary resources, primarily user staff personnel, for acceptance testing
5) Comparing the actual acceptance testing results with the desired acceptance testing results. This may be performed using testing software.
6) Making decisions as to whether additional work is needed prior to placing the software in operation, whether the software can be placed in operation with additional work to be done, or whether the software is fully acceptable and can be placed into production as is
If the software does not fully meet the user needs, but will be placed into operation, the user must develop a strategy to anticipate problems and pre-define the actions to be taken should those problems occur.
Tags: User Acceptance Testing, Software Testing, Quality Assurance
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