When it comes to ITSM Best Practices there is no better source than that of a seasoned Consultant with the voice of experience of years Implementation experience.
One of the most crucial steps in System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is User Acceptance Testing (UAT), a type of system and business objective validation, performed by the end users, and business objective sign-off by the project owner; not to be confused with System Testing which is performed by the Developer and/or Administrator
Many ITSM Implementations fall short when it comes to proper UAT Testing, be it due to a lack of resources, time, or budget, but more often than not due to a shortcoming of proper UAT Action Plan, UAT Test Cases and Scripts, and a lack of Best Practices, Strategy, Coordination, and Planning.
Today we shall focus on ITSM Best Practices for UAT.
UAT Best Practices
- Daily Stand-Up Calls coordinated by the decision maker and UAT Test Lead with the UAT Test Team
- Review of UAT Decision Tree
- Review Test Results, questions, unexpected behaviour, workarounds, tester comments
- Review Reference Data to-do list for PROD
- Identify key areas for training (bullet points)
- Test Case Maintenance – identify new test cases or changes needed to existing test cases
- Daily Email Summary to the Consultant, bullet points, of areas that need to be addressed, identifying “show-stoppers” and “must-haves”, “questions”
- Scribe – Appoint a person to take meeting notes, and keep track of any “nice-to-haves”, “parking lot items”, “knowledge articles” needed. Typically this function falls on the Knowledge Manager/Trainer.
- Weekly Calls with ITSM Consultant to review the progress, test results, and discuss UAT remediation scope.
- Focus on Job Functions, not features, not enhancements, not future phases.
- No Bug Hunts – The point of UAT is not to find bugs. It’s to ensure day-to-day functions can be carried out and the steps for those job functions are documented for training purposes. Any unexpected behaviour can be recorded in tester comments.
- Keep it Simple – Focus on test cases at hand. If there are any issues, make sure to record the reference #, 1 or 2 screenshots, bullet point tester comments, no need for long novels with pages of screenshots.
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