User Acceptance Testing Is Hardly Testing

Provactively entitled blog post here. At first glance it looks like something belittling user acceptance testing.

"Quality assurance personnel use performance and reliability testing to verify service levels of the system as a whole. While each of these techniques serves a unique purpose on the project, they also share a common goal - find defects. However, this is something your user acceptance tests should never do."

However, when you read the well written item, it is actually a plea to improve testing early in the lifecycle:

"Numerous studies have shown that fixing defects found late in a delivery cycle can carry an extremely high cost. If serious problems are found during User Acceptance Testing (or UAT), they can easily translate into significant budget overruns, slips of the schedule, or even project cancellation. Issues must be identified and addressed as early as possible. By the time UAT rolls around, there should be nothing major left to uncover. User acceptance testing should be little more than a pat on the back of your development team for a job well done."

I like the idea of UAT being a pat on the back very much.