User Acceptance Testing : Codeless Automation solution
User Acceptance testing is an integral part of software development life cycle. By definition user acceptance testing is a type of testing where the software is tested in the real world by intended audience. This is the last phase of software testing and often performed to verify that software can take up real world tasks and developed as per user requirements.
In most of the organizations, it is performed by the Product owner or business analyst as they represent ‘end user’ and document the requirements at initial phases.
Now the question is, why do we need user acceptance testing? After so much of testing being already done, is it really required? As we all know that before UAT, test engineers already perform functional and non-functional testing and make sure that the application is working fine then what is the use of user acceptance testing?
I will take an example to explain this. Let’s consider a requirement which states , “ Develop a feature which enables users to communicate with each other through text messages” Now the details in the requirement clearly mention that it should be a chat feature. Developer developed a standard chat feature and test engineers tested according to PRD that its functionality is working fine. They performed functional testing, performance testing and load testing to ensure that the chat feature is robust and can handle concurrent users. Now what will be tested in UAT? UAT will ensure that the chat feature which is being developed is usable to the end users and they are able to communicate with each other effectively.
While testing there might be issues like messages are getting delivered but there is a lag of few seconds. So functionality is fine but that lag can make the feature less usable for end users.
Clearly UAT is the final check before code goes on production so it is critical.
Now the two important questions arise-
- Who performs user acceptance testing?
- How to perform user acceptance testing?
Who performs User Acceptance Testing?
- Product Managers/business analysts/Client
- End users.
How to perform User Acceptance Testing?
The most important part of UAT process is to decide how to perform it. Most of the time UAT cases has been written by product owners and test engineers execute them before release. Or in some cases product owners may execute UAT cases by themselves and provide a UAT go ahead.
Approach for UAT
Manually written UAT tests- An approach can be to write UAT tests and get them reviewed by a set of end users or product owners and execute them manually before release. But as we all know manual test execution takes time, and in agile, we expect faster deliveries. There are few major drawbacks with manual testing approach-
- Manual tests are unproductive as it takes time to write and execute them, making it unfit in faster delivery agile environments.
- Investing time and effort for hand-written manual tests is inefficient as it provides a second layer of coverage on unit and integration testing.
UAT Automation-There is no denying that automation would help in reducing cost and time required. But keep in mind that UAT owner is essentially a non-technical person who will not understand the coded tests. So the automation framework built on the most popular Selenium, cucumber using any programming language may not serve the purpose. The essential aspect of UAT automation is to decide the right tool. There are many code-less automation tools available which can be easy to maintain and understand for non- techies.
Codeless Automation Tools for UAT
When we talk about codeless, the first thing comes into our mind is record and playback tools.
As a test engineer, we have used record and playback tools in the initial days of automation and got a really bad impression. The Selenium IDE or QTP record and playback tools used to provide limited support for logical solutions.
But in recent times, a lot of things have changed and there are many record and playback tools available which are developed using artificial intelligence to provide a seamless automation. Also, now a days application UI keeps on changing so maintaining codeless automation framework for UAT is a lot more easy and manageable. There are two major benefits which we can get from modern codelss automation tools-
- Easy to create, modify and maintain. Thus non-technical users can also get more control over UAT suits.
- More productive. It becomes easy to keep UAT tests in sync with requirement and implementation changes.
Choosing the right Acceptance testing tool
At the end, choosing the right tool for UAT automation matters most. CloudQA offers a codeless automation testing tool with a very user friendly interface. Its core functionality is record and play-back user actions performed on the application which makes it apt for UAT automation.
Test Recorder contains the settings and the list of steps to execute in order to test the application in a certain way. Test Cases are auto-generated using the Test Recorder.
TruRT which is a set of logically grouped test cases in a random or sequential order, allows to schedule set of test cases or invoke them through an API. The execution engine runs on Amazon’s cloud for faster execution. In the end it provides an extensive reporting with different type of views. You can also download the report in CSV or HTML format to be analysed by different stakeholders.
Does this sound like the functionality which you can use to optimize your UAT automation? You can register for a trial version from the link below-
Register for the trial version and record a demo test. The platform is simple and interactive for a non-technical person and it will take hardly five minutes to record a basic test.
There is a very rich documentation available, which can be used to understand the tool better-
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