Who Owns UAT?

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  CRM   Quality   Stakeholder Management   Testing/Test Management  

Just who is in charge of your user acceptance testing? For some, the question comes up when new situations arise and people are unsure as to who is impacted and, thereby, who should take charge of the process. These firms may have an established culture of finger-pointing when confronted while others indulge in community shrugs of “I dunno!”

For many, UAT belongs in the hands of business analysts and corresponding business owners. These individuals collaborate to create the test plans and test cases and then determine how to implement and track their progress, all the while integrating the skills of technical experts and a quality assurance team.

Business Perspective
Ideally, an organization deploys business analysts to work closely with real-life business people so as to use their experience and manufacture real-life situations that can then be converted into testing conditions. Experts are identified who not only have ideas of the big picture of the operation, but also have an understanding of the minutia involved in the seemingly commonplace (yet necessary) steps to follow a workflow as well as how to navigate off the beaten path (i.e. break something). These people then know how to execute tests, including the development of automated protocols that help improve scenario results. They also need to be educated on documenting problems and working with…

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