I. ROLE OF USER ACCEPTANCE TESTING

• Why users may resist involvement
• Making users confident about testing
• Objectives, types, and scope of testing
• Acceptance testing as user’s self-defense
• Why technical tests don’t catch all the errors
• Essential elements of effective testing
• CAT-Scan Approach to find more errors
• Proactive Testing Life Cycle model
• Separate technical and acceptance test paths
• Place of UAT in overall test structure
• Making sure important tests are done first
• Developer/tester/user test responsibilities

II. DEFINING ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA

• Defining acceptance test strategy up-front Source and role of acceptance criteria
• 5 elements criteria should address
• Functionality the user must demonstrate
• How much, how often user must test
• Determining system quality
• Who should carry out acceptance tests
• How acceptance tests should be performed
• Added benefit, revealing requirements errors
  

III. DESIGNING ACCEPTANCE TEST PLANS

• Expanding the acceptance criteria
• Allocating criteria to system design
• Refining the design to catch oversights
• Checklist of common problems to test
• Equivalence classes and boundary values
• Making quality factors (attributes) testable
• Structural testing applicable to users
• GUI features that always need to be tested
• Defining requirements-based tests
• Constructing use cases
  
• Cautions about use case pitfalls
  
• One- and two-column use case formats
  
• Turning use cases into tests
  Consolidating tests into efficient test scripts

IV. CARRYING OUT ACCEPTANCE TESTS

• Differentiating test cases and test data
  
• Traps that destroy value of acceptance tests
  
• Warning about conversions
  
• Documentation, training, Help tests
  
• Configuration, installation, localization
  
• Security, backup, recovery tests
  
• Suitability of automating acceptance testing
  
• Performance, stress, load testing
  
• Issues on creating test conditions, data
  
• Capturing results, determining correctness
  
• User's defect tracking and metrics