HomeWriting user acceptance test cases
In my experience of launching products in SDLC, waterfall and Agile, the following has been the most successful practice for writing the user acceptance test cases (UAT):
Step1) The business analyst or someone with business analysis skills (could be the product owner in an Agile team) writes user requirements, or use cases or user stories with acceptance criteria (Agile) that captures the functional & non-functional requirements.
Step2) The QA / Tester from the testing team (or the tester/QA who is part of the core Agile team) reads the requirement specification and creates the test cases from it that covers all the scenarios mentioned in the requirements.
Step3) The test cases could be either manual or automated – depending upon how much automation has been implemented in the test cycle for your team and your organisation.
Since the QA/Test team is in-charge of running the tests, they should be the author of these test cases, for the following reasons:
- They could amend them when needed
- Keep a track of the metrics on each test run
- Keep an eye on the test results upon each regression test run
- Provide reporting after each test run
- Manage the correlation of test cases, and bugs raised during testing and after Go-Live
Note: The product roadmap tells us the ‘What’ and not ‘How’ to get things done.
