If you’re using tools like TestRail to help you manage and execute your automated testing, you might be wondering how to integrate your user acceptance testing into your DevOps pipeline. After all, if you can run all of your tests in the same place, why not take the most efficient route? You can do this by adding user acceptance testing to your DevOps pipeline, so that each time code goes through the DevOps pipeline, it automatically runs all of the user acceptance tests and gives you feedback about whether or not that feature is ready to ship. Here’s how to make it happen.
Why User Acceptance Tests are important?
First, it’s important for testers and developers to understand that both parties are aiming for a common goal: ensuring your product is secure, stable, and meeting or exceeding your customer’s expectations. A simple way of thinking about acceptance testing is as a safety net of sorts: If all goes well and your app achieves its business goals without errors, then you don’t need any test plan at all.
What are the benefits of UAT?
User acceptance testing (UAT) is an excellent way to ensure that applications are working as they should before being launched. And, with increased adoption of DevOps—and a focus on continuous delivery and continuous deployment—it’s important that automated UAT strategies be put into place in order to fully automate releases.
When to add UAT tasks to a DevOps release
We talked about how to get started with user acceptance testing (UAT) with your development team. There are a few reasons why an organization might want to run UAT tasks as part of its release process. For example, adding UAT tasks adds more steps and time to your release process, but it also adds assurance that all code is working properly before it goes live.
Who performs UAT?
The most obvious answer is that your users should perform UAT—they are, after all, testing your product and verifying its value for them. However, depending on how early in development you’re performing UAT, it may not be feasible or practical for users to perform certain kinds of tests. You may find that you need an additional step or two between initial development and final deployment.
Where do I start with UAT?
Before you can fully implement a user acceptance testing process, you have to answer a few questions: Who will be involved? What tools and resources do they need? What is it that I’m actually testing? On top of answering these questions, you should also consider how your users will access and interact with your application. Automating tests can become an invaluable way of automating everything from UI checks to integration tests.
Tools to use for UAT
Whether you’re building web apps, native mobile apps, or some combination of both, tools that make testing easier can improve your productivity and your quality. Here are a few options for getting started with user acceptance testing If you’re building a web app: Selenium is an open-source tool that lets you write automated tests in JavaScript. It supports multiple browsers (including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and more) on multiple operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X). You can either use Selenium IDE to write tests visually or run them from within a command line interface.
Testing strategies for UAT
Test early and often. When it comes to implementing user acceptance testing, less is more—simply put, UAT should happen as often as possible. Part of providing a continuous delivery pipeline means pushing code into production frequently. When teams are managing multiple versions of software simultaneously, it’s important for tests to be written at each stage—even before developers check code into source control or merge new features. As issues get discovered earlier in development cycles, they’re easier and cheaper to fix than later on.
