User Acceptance Testing for Business Analysts (BA29)

The objectives of this course are to:

• Develop an understanding about basic concepts associated with User Acceptance Testing
• See how UAT applies to the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)
• Recognize benefits of improved quality of deployed software using User Acceptance Testing
• Identify the key roles, activities and deliverables which make up User Acceptance Testing
• Use a Business Use Case to define scenarios for testing
• Create a UAT test plan and write UAT test cases with associated test data
• Understand the process for testing functional and non-functional requirements
• Identify the challenges of testing vendor-supplied applications

Target Participant:

This course is designed for the Business Analyst professional who is involved with testing the functionality of technology projects.

Prerequisites:

It is recommended the participants have a working knowledge of requirements process, requirements elicitation techniques, and computer systems prior to taking this course.

Course Outline

Day 1

• Background – why is testing important?
  1. Symptoms and sources of quality problems
  2. Benefits of early inspections and reviews
  3. The Quality Maturity Scale
  4. The current state of testing
  5. Challenges in improving quality

• The Testing Lifecycle – A process overview
  1. What is a testing lifecycle?
  2. Iterative testing principles
  3. Sample testing types

• Testing Types – A process overview
  1. Classifying testing types
  2. System, Integration, Vendor Validation, Regression, Maintenance, etc.

• Software Testing - the Basics
  1. What is software testing?
  2. Typical problems that we encounter with software
  3. The Cost of Quality (CoQ) and the cost of finding defects too late
  4. The four stages of software testing (Unit, Integration, System, User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
  5. Testing best practices
  6. Exercise: “How would you test it?” – A new technology is presented to the participants and they are asked to brainstorm what would they test to ensure it is working correctly. (15 minutes)

• Understanding the Tester’s Terminology
  1. What is UAT and what is the role of the UAT Tester?
  2. Characteristics of a good UAT tester
  3. The tasks of UAT testing
  4. The UAT documents
  5. Common terms & definitions
     1. The three testing techniques
     2. Testing visibility (White Box, Gray Box, and Black Box testing)
  6. Exercise: UAT Jeopardy – A fun and fast-paced game of Jeopardy – used as a review of terms, concepts, and roles learned in this lesson. (15 minutes)

Day 2

• The UAT Planning Process
  1. The importance of test planning
  2. What is a Test Plan?
  3. The six steps for creating a Test Plan
  4. General testing tips
  5. Exercise: “Create a Test Plan” – The participants will identify test scenarios from a Business Use Case and identify test objectives and high-level test data for each scenario

• UAT Test Coverage
  1. What is test coverage?
  2. Using a Requirements Traceability Matrix
  3. Set the testing scope – what to test and what not to test
  4. The Test Coverage Matrix

• Creating and Executing the UAT Test Cases
  1. What are the goals of testing?
  2. What is a Test Case?
  3. How do Test Plans and Test Cases relate?
  4. The four steps for creating a Test Case
  5. Exercise: “Write a Test Case” – The participants will be asked to write a high-level Test Case from their Business Use Case and define test data for a portion of the steps
  6. Preparing, running, and documenting the Tests
  7. General testing tips and techniques
     
     
• Verifying the Test Results
  1. Documenting test results
  2. What is a defect?
  3. How to log a defect?
  4. The “bug” lifecycle
  5. Writing a good problem description
  6. Taking screen snapshots
  7. 10 tips to avoid writing bad defect reports
  8. Exercise: “Log a defect” – The participants will write a concise and complete statement to explain a defect
  9. Signing-off on the product

• Testing Vendor-Supplied Applications
  1. Challenges of testing vendor-supplied applications
  2. Challenges to the business
  3. Eight steps for testing vendor-supplied applications
  4. Handout: An industry case study for testing vendor products