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This was a holdover from the punch card era where the machine dictated the interface. As computers became more and more ubiquitous and began to invade every element of business function, they ceased to be the domain of a particular department and became as universal as pens and pencils.

The “exclusively for geeks” factor has reduced until most, if not every, individual in the average organisation uses some sort of software application in their daily activities. This is one of the main reasons why UAT was developed in the first place. User Acceptance Testing has also greatly increased the importance of aesthetics in software development. It is no longer important to just produce functioning software, that function must also be aesthetically pleasing to the user.

While the original goal of software testing was simply to make certain that the software met specifications and didn’t have any bugs, User Acceptance Testing exists to support day to day business activity. Rather than being concerned with the software alone, UAT tests for common as well as possible scenarios that could interrupt business operations. Traditional testing is concerned primarily with the software alone, while User Acceptance Testing is concerned with application plus environment.

UAT places a necessary buffer between the software and the live environment. Usability has become as important as function. This means that UAT is concerned with the unusual as well as the routine. This is a major change in the testing paradigm, because it acknowledges that the user must often think on his or her feet and take actions that aren’t always standard procedure and that the application must allow for this within the standard business requirements.

User Acceptance Testing enables analysis and identification of both normal and unusual business scenarios and the testing of the application against both the normal and the abnormal, all before the system goes live. This raises the final quality of function and makes integration into the business environment easier and more productive.

UAT makes certain that solutions meet business requirements at a level beyond simple day to day activity. It enables the integration of resources and relevant tools before non-integration can become a problem. It also points out where more training is needed and allows the user to do hands on evaluation and provide needed feedback to the development team and stakeholders.

There was a time when pleasing the user was not a part of testing. In fact, user acceptance has only recently become important and is now considered a vital part of testing protocol.

Many of the investors I’ve been speaking with have more than one investment, and every single one of those investments is a technology company which requires or currently delivers software testing across their assets. It only dawned on me as I started to talking with investors that not only do they have the money, but they also own the problem we solve!.

To maximise my time spent with investors I always keep this in mind and put my pitch in context of how their portfolio companies could get value from what we do. I put my pitches in context of an existing startup they have invested in, and how that company might use or benefit from the Bugwolf marketplace  and SaaS platform. Just the other day I had a 30 minute potential investor discussion and ended up walking out with a new customer.

And this means, while you’re pitching venture capitalists and raising capital you could not only be learning about your products, but also increasing your revenue and possibly your valuation.

A UAT Market Assessment is just what it sounds like, a traditional user acceptance test, only focused on the assets of other companies instead of your own. And just like traditional UAT, the output will help you understand to what extent companies with challenges similar to your own, are meeting the needs of real-world users.

The output of your review will typically fall into one of two buckets: passes or failures.

Passes & Failures

There are two important things you want to know as a result of a UAT Market Assessment:

1. Passes - positive functionality or experiences.

2. Failures - broken functionality or poor experiences.

A “pass” for instance may highlight a particularly effective feature or workflow that you may wish to replicate or reference on your own site. A “failure” on the other hand highlights a poor user experience or buggy feature that should be used as a warning of what to avoid.

UAT Market Assessments are valuable for a variety of reasons.

5 Reasons To Run UAT Market Assessments

Winning A Digital Competitive Edge

Digital transformation and innovation begins with an understanding of the status quo. Less than a decade ago, digital was just a delivery channel. Nowadays, the lines between digital and product are almost non-existent. For example, online loan applications, internet banking, mobile payments and apps are all perfectly valid reasons for customers to choose a particular bank over another. As a digital leader, you have a responsibility to understand what’s happening in your market.

Fast-Track Planning & Design

Planning and design is an understandably tedious stage in the SDLC. UAT Market Assessments allow you to point to concrete examples of what you like and don’t like. At very least, this will help to clarify the scope of work and avoid unnecessary back and forth.

Evolve From Current Best Practices

Newton famously said, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. At the risk of giving your competitors undue praise, Newton’s point was that he didn’t start from scratch, and neither should you. Reviewing the software of others is no replacement for your own research, but their (often sizable) investment in research, development and best practices can often give your next project a head start.

Build A Case For Transformation

In some instances, incremental improvements aren’t enough to solve the challenges you’re up against. UAT Market Assessments can also help demonstrate why existing solutions aren’t meeting the needs of users as well as help build a case for starting from a blank slate. Ambitious plans often require ambitious budgets - so any objective evidence you can provide to make your case is extremely valuable.

Avoid Rework & Costly Mis-steps

Occasionally, features and functionality that seem like a good idea, don’t turn out that way in practice. Fortunately UAT Market Assessments allows you to review the shortfalls of other people's’ workflows before you begin working on your own. This helps you overcome sticking points and scrap bad ideas before they derail your project, cost you money and blowout deadlines.

What Does It Look Like In Practice?

UAT Market Assessments can focus on any front-end workflow, on any device, browser or operating system. Since the process is usually deployed with a specific feature in mind, the scope is typically kept quite narrow. For instance, it could focus on specific forms, navigations, applications, media, search functionality, etc..

The output is somewhat similar to a conventional user acceptance test, except the focus of the process is not so much to identify bugs, but rather to highlight how certain features work and why they are effective or ineffective.

Once the UAT Market Assessment process is complete, you’ll have a succinct and critical overview of your competitors’ assets. At Bugwolf, we provide video recordings of key features and workflows along with audio commentary. We’ll also provide a text summary of the video as well as the technical specifications of the OS, browser and devices.

How We Help

If you are thinking about running UAT Market Assessments, we’d love to help. Our process is quick, easy and independent. There are three simple steps:

1. Define Objectives

Discuss what you would like to achieve with your Testing Director. This is where you decide which companies you’d like to review and which features/workflows/devices you’d like us to focus on. Companies may include director competitors, digital teams from different industrys tackling similar problems, or a combination of both.

2. Run The Test Challenge

A team of UAT professionals will begin navigating selected sites. This typically takes six hours in total. They will provide video and audio commentary on functionality, user experience, user interface, and other areas that may be relevant to your objectives.

3. Review The Findings

After the challenge, we will regroup with your team to walk you through key insights. Your team will get full access to all video and audio reports for quick reference as you need them.

Start Your First UAT Market Assessment Today

If you’d like to run your own UAT Market Assessment, we’d be glad to help.

Bugwolf helps you generate market insights that fast-track software planning and design, reduces rework and costly mis-steps and helps build a case for transformation. We do this by providing flexible, on-demand access to professional UAT teams.

Existing Bugwolf clients are invited to conduct their own UAT Market Assessments on demand. To find out more, speak to your Testing Director.

If you are new to Bugwolf and would like to learn more about how to get started, the quickest and easiest way to find out more is to Request A Demo by clicking HERE.

This has put enormous pressure on different parts of organisations and shifted the organisation's risk profile, which was once shared by thousands of employees, to a small but growing team of digital leaders. And when products are released to millions of users with defects, these organisations call centres get overloaded with support calls..

At Bugwolf, we recognise that risk is not always addressed efficiently by technology but has made the impact of failure even higher. To combat this we provide organisations with a fresh set of eyes to review their digital products before release. We do this in an accelerated time and act as an elite team reviewing the work of the your existing quality assurance teams.

The result is significantly faster releases with less defects making it into production, in turn resulting in less support calls to the call centre, and more time selling.

There is a good chance that if you hire a software tester on-site you will be required to commit to a lengthy contract. Also, depending on the type of environment you’re running such as waterfall, agile, or continuous deployment, that individual might spend a significant amount of their time in between test cycles waiting for releases. Downtime is both costly and can significantly impact employee motivation and corporate culture. Bugwolf helps to eliminate and address this inefficiency of resource.

We’ve addressed this challenge at Bugwolf by providing a SaaS platform which enables our clients to accelerate software testing themselves, a vetted marketplace to extend their existing testing teams, or managed tests where clients can outsource their testing.There are no monthly commitments and you can scale the team when needed.

When utilising our model clients discover more bugs with less people in less time prior to releasing applications, reducing test cycles from weeks to days, lowering the cost of testing by up to 50%, and accelerating testing and product releases.

In turn this means, you will get access to a team of software testers as and when needed, plus you won’t be paying for expensive resources in between downtime or release cycles.

Most organisations have a plan for these types of changes, but many also do not. Traditionally these releases cause a range of issues as most organisations are focused on testing new products in the pipeline as opposed to maintenance testing products which are already in production. It can be challenging re-assigning resources and re-prioritising work.

At Bugwolf we provide on-demand elite teams of testers which, within very short notice, can be rigorously testing your iOS applications for iOS 9 beta release. Our elite teams can be assembled on a rolling basis to customer experience test your applications as Apple releases new beta versions and your team pushes updates.

And this means delivering better digital customer experiences to your customers at a much faster pace and more cost effective rate than your competitors, increasing your net promoter score, and creating brand champions.

Typically, testing suffers when time is constrained. And if overlooked, it can be extremely costly. If your app gets rejected due to a bug and you have a marketing program ready to go, it can cause you significant pain. It will typically cost you two weeks during approval, two weeks to pull it from the store and remediate, and a further two weeks to get it reviewed and approved again.

To reduce the chance of this occurring, Bugwolf provides accelerated testing even in circumstances when time is short and, amazingly, testing can be left to the last minute. We provide a pay for performance model to address the inefficiencies of testing and create an environment where testers compete to report defects over accelerated time frames.

And this means, better quality apps are submitted to the app approval process, reducing the chance of marketing delays, which is good for reducing costs, increasing downloads, and ultimately for revenue.

Now the average laptop contains far more computing power than a room sized computer of the 1950’s and the average person can carry around more ability to communicate in his or her pocket than was possessed by Washington and Moscow combined during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Portable and distributed computing has become the backbone of the software industry. A mobile virtual private network can provide access to every application on the home network and yet it’s much more than that. Everything from the mobile device used to the network itself and the applications are all run by software. This software must not only be tested to function, it must be tested to interface. Now more than ever, no program runs in isolation.

Mobile computing allows anyone to take a computer, along with all related hardware and software, directly out into the field. Collating and processing is done in real time and often on an ad-hoc basis. This means that testing for usability in the field is more and more important. It is becoming increasingly vital to test software in the environment in which it will function and with the type of information it will process. Not only must the hardware be tested under actual field condition, but the software as well.

There was a time when information processing was done by one or two departments and was done after the fact. There was a delay between when the information was collected and when it was processed. And collecting the information was a laborious undertaking that usually required writing it down or filling out forms. This meant that computers were, in a sense, archives with the added ability to process the information that they housed. Now computers, smartphones, tablets and other devices are real time processing units that operate in the here and now. The information is processed almost at the moment that it comes in. and it comes in rapidly and often from measuring devices and other automated means. What was once written down and then converted and stored in one or two places, can now be communicated to hundreds of different areas and stored on a myriad of devices and processed in all sorts of ways, all at the same time.

Software testing must take this speed and vast capacity into account. And so testing is no longer just about finding bugs or making sure the application works. Now it is also about the environment the application must function in, including the devices it will be used on and the other software with which it must interface. Failure to understand the operational environment can cause delays in deployment, erratic system behavior and a need for retesting. All of which can adversely impact revenue and damage the brand of the application provider as well as the brand of the company using the application.  

This new reality raises the bar. Testing has moved far beyond the level of fixing bugs and is now a vital and integral part of the entire development process.

Digital technology has given the millennials a level of flexibility their parents didn't have. Millennials have been accused of being the me me me generation, yet they are the most socially conscious generation since the 1960s.  They have also been accused of being lazy, this isn't really the case, millennials simply don't approach work in the traditional manner. They tend to aim for quality of life rather than quantity of money and their priorities are quite different.They want to make a positive impact on the world. This is probably because they have grown up in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Millennials are far less trusting of the economic landscape than their parents were. In fact, over 60% of millennials are concerned about  having enough money for retirement. This is a far greater percentage than their parents generation.  And a good portion of millennials are less interested in retiring than in having jobs they can enjoy for a lifetime.

Many millennials have seen their parents retirement funds destroyed by economic circumstances and so they aren't that interested in sticking with a particular company for their entire working life. They want to keep their destiny in their own hands and make a living on their own terms.  This is why over 67% of Millennials want to start their own businesses.They are also the most in debt generation with over a trillion dollars in student loans.  This makes paying off debt a high priority.

Another major influence is that Millennials have never known a world without the Internet. They are the most connected generation in history. Their social interaction is incredibly widespread. Consequently, they are more likely to question social norms, because they don’t need those norms for a sense of social identity.

Millennials are less interested in the traditional retirement scheme of work now and play later. They want to be comfortable but are still inclined to do a job they love despite the salary. Do it for the money is simply not in most Millennial's lexicon.  However, living a happy and satisfying life is important to them and living a quality lifestyle while improving the world, is not a bad ethic to have.

This doesn't mean that beta testing is a perfect guarantee of functionality, or marketability. The quality of beta testing depends a great deal on how it is done. It must be kept in mind that beta testing is a customer facing activity. Consequently, the type of testing done depends a great deal on the intended use of the software, the environment in which the software will be used and the possible difficulties that exist in that environment. This is true in both functional and nonfunctional forms of beta testing.

Simply moving the software out of the laboratory environment is always a positive step. Real environments can have effects on software that could not be predicted in the lab.

The limited distribution of the software to either the target market or to professional user experience testers, provides a testing viewpoint available in no other way. The very fact that it's not the lab environment can create new understanding with regard to usability. While there are some who say that agile testing makes beta testing redundant, the reality is that beta testing is a vital part of the agile framework.

While beta testing is essentially user testing, this doesn't mean that the only information that can be gained is from the user's viewpoint. There is a great deal more than that. Product feedback can provide information beyond just a narrow framework of usability. It can also provide details about what elements of functionality have been overlooked, something that happens with even the best documentation. And it can provide inspiration for new products as well as what would be useful improvements in future versions of the product under test.    

The beta testing of software can reveal previously unknown information that is only capable of being revealed in an operational environment. This helps refine the product so that it better meets user expectations by increasing product viability through understanding and correcting issues that may come up. This enables improvement to take place without the possible blowback that can result from prematurely releasing a product onto the market. Preventing bad public relations from faulty software not only increases the marketability of the application, it also prevents the company from developing a bad reputation that will take time and money to correct in the public's mind. This alone is worth the cost of beta testing.

In a sense, beta testing is a form of proof of concept. Documentation outlines the concept at the beginning of the development cycle, elements of the software are then developed and tested in a modular fashion. While this may include some forms of user testing, it is beta testing that confirms that the software functions as a complete concept.

Beta software testing enables end users, or professional testers acting as end users, to report issues discovered outside the lab environment. This "real world" testing takes much of the mystery out of the product by revealing problems that cannot be discovered any other way.

Beta testing is different and its standards are different from those of the development team. Ideally, beta testing standards should rigorously conform to the standards of end users. It is testing through use and in this way provides a new viewpoint while confirming previous development and testing, at the same time.

There are many approaches to beta testing which differ based on the criteria involved and what users are involved. It is a form of user acceptance testing and may include functional and nonfunctional tests, depending on what the circumstances and user requirements are. While problems may arise that cause the software to crash, beta testing is not destruction testing. Destruction testing is an actual attempt to cause the software or subsystem to fail by overdriving the application or providing it with the wrong kind of input. It is often ad-hoc and is generally carried out by professional testers. However, all beta testing falls into one of two categories, these are "open" and "closed." Open testing allows anyone to access the software and is commonly carried out on applications and games that are intended for a large audience. Closed beta testing is restricted by the developer and may only include those people who will be end users or professional testers performing the roles of end users.  

The beta version of an application will normally contain all the functionality of the planned release in order to make for as realistic a test as possible. This enables testing of all parts of the system and makes error identification easier as there is no contrast between beta and release versions.

Non-functional testing is easier and realistic as the system will integrate into its environment in the same way that the release version will. This is why the hardware configuration that the software will run on needs to be fully known so that there are no surprises that would confuse testing.

The only real difficulty is making sure that testers accurately reflect end users. They must either be end users themselves or testers trained to behave as realistic end users. Testers must be able and willing to provide feedback to developers. Getting feedback can be difficult when testers are "raw" recruits, such as those recruited over the Internet to test new games. They may be more interested in playing the game than providing accurate feedback.

Beta testing is a multi-layered process that can provide vital information regarding reliability, functionality, compatibility and usability to stakeholders  and thereby ensuring that software has reached the highest quality possible before release. This in turn adds value by creating the best possible public relations following initial release. It also provides information that will enable the software to be improved in future releases, and so extending that value into the future.