To assure the technical qualities of a product, to find bugs and logical mistakes in the software, it is essential to engage in quality assurance activities. However, QA testing won’t tell you if the end product is aligned with business objectives and can perform required tasks in real-world scenarios. So, to ensure the development team is building the right product for the actual end users, conducting user acceptance testing is vital.

What is user acceptance testing and how is it different from quality assurance?

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) checks whether a product is the right one for the end users. It has other names, e.g., end-user testing, operational, application, beta testing, or validation but they describe the same thing. In quality assurance, it’s important to distinguish between validation and verification.

Verification refers to general QA processes aimed at testing the technical aspects of a product to ensure it actually works. Validation (or user acceptance testing) is conducted to make sure that the product corresponds with business requirements and can be used by the end user. Validation activity can be divided into two types of testing.

Alpha testing is the initial stage of acceptance testing, typically performed by internal testers, to ensure that the product functions correctly and meets business requirements.

Beta testing, the second type of acceptance testing, aims at meeting user acceptance criteria. UAT can be performed by

the actual users of an existing product,
users of a previous version of a product,
stakeholders involved in the development of the product, and/or
business analysts as end-user specialists.
This enables the development team to fix most of the usability problems, bugs, and unexpected issues concerning functionality, system design, business requirements, etc.

Why do you actually need UAT?
The main purpose of acceptance testing is to validate that the product corresponds with the needs of users (defined at the product discovery stage) and is ready for launch. According to an Origsoft survey on UAT usage, over 75 per cent of respondents said they conduct multiple cycles of end-user testing with 57 per cent claiming the poor quality of the product as a reason.

So, here are the main reasons why UAT is important and should be a part of your development.

Ensure correspondence with business requirements. As we already mentioned, UAT is done to verify that the product operates in real-world circumstances as required and allows end users to solve targeted problems. If you skip UAT, you might miss out on some important flaws or system malfunctions that will inevitably cause user dissatisfaction.

Adjust initial requirements. Sometimes, as end users test the product, they can come up with some valuable thoughts on how to improve the tested software. Getting such feedback will allow you to adjust your requirements to get a result that will be more useful for your customers.

Avoid losses. First, it’s cheaper to fix the product in the early stages of development, so finding flaws due to UAT will allow your development team to improve the product much more easily (that mostly concerns the Agile model though. Read on for more details). Second, we all know stories about product failures because of poor functionality and usability. UAT provides you with real-world user feedback and makes it far less likely to have losses caused by an unsuccessful product launch.

In any case, UAT requires organization and preparation work to make it effective. If you want to ensure your product’s validity, consider the following steps in conducting user acceptance testing.