Summary: This article discusses the importance of benchmarks in evaluating User Acceptance Testing (UAT) tools, emphasizing the need for UAT tools to have a holistic approach, quality templates, powerful reporting features, and compatibility with DevOps and Agile environments to maximize their effectiveness.
UAT identifies and eliminates defects and bugs and maximizes user feedback and improvements. How can we separate top-level UAT tools from the mediocre?
Benchmarks. That’s how it’s done. Let’s take a look.
Benchmark 1: Holistic Approach
A winning UAT tool must have it all. Like a Swiss Army knife, it should do everything your team needs to do in order to conceive, design, and implement the testing process while empowering human end users to do what they do best: Be human!
There’s a reason why we’ve listed this benchmark first. If your UAT toolkit is missing certain key features, your test will never get past the starting line, much less the finish line. We’re talking about things like defining requirements and risks, planning test runs, analyzing test results, managing related issues, and designing test cases.
Within this important benchmark lies even more sub-benchmarks:
- Ease of use in handling large amounts of requirements and risks by organizing requirements into groups
- Utilizing varied requirement types while prioritizing risks by assignment of proper classifications
- Leveraging a powerful editor that can execute test runs at any place, any time, with no experience required
- The ability to reuse test cases with a single click, including all requirements, risks, and applications -- all things included in a quality UAT.
Benchmark 2: Quality Templates
If manual testing is a football game, then test templates are the coach’s playbook. Templates lay out the test strategy—objectives, schedule, estimates, and deliverables—in addition to all the resources required for testing.
To mix a few more metaphors, templates are the blueprints to the dream house that is your software project. The template provides the what and how, as well as the means to best validate the tested app’s quality. Templates benefit everyone: quality assurance managers, test managers, and test users.
A properly benchmarked UAT allows creation and management of reusable project blueprints and is deployable as often as needed. A top-notch UAT tool should also offer an extensive library of project templates—and that library must populate requirements, risks, test suites, and test cases.
Benchmark 3: Reports
If user testing is a black box, then powerful reports are a window into that box, telling the real story of the testing’s success or failure while also highlighting threats. To meet this benchmark, the benchmarked reporting feature must offer real-time insight into testing status and progress. That level of reporting gives your team the top-down, sideways, and “every which way” view of the test project, tracking team-wide workloads, test runs, test cases, and arising issues.
What good is a reporting function if it only provides a limited view? The best reports tell the whole story with traceability, progress, and coverage reports. Want to know more about the UAT’s vital issues? Then you will also need issue reports that cover status, impact, category, priority, and organization.
Benchmark 4: DevOps and Agile
When a quality manager is trying to focus on strategic goals within an Agile environment, they need tools that empower the intentional coaching of all teams involved. In addition, QA needs connectivity when interfacing the UAT process with an Azure DevOps project. With TestMonitor, you can easily create an issue and relax. Matching work items will automatically be added to Azure DevOps.
Whether you’re dealing with the initial import of data or the export of completed work, your UAT tool should make life easier by allowing simple importing from spreadsheets, while also accounting for field mapping from columns. Imports and exports should never be a gamble, but rather optimized so the user can rapidly set up existing data and retain the option of viewing a list of all imports and exports in the environment.
TestMonitor does it all. We meet and exceed every UAT benchmark. Find out for yourself. Start your free trial of TestMonitor today.
