Friday, November 18, 2011

Acceptance Test Manager

Ever wonder what skills are required for an user acceptance test manager? Amongst the mountain of text on a recent job advert for a UAT manager were these skill requirements:

  • Analytical skills: Ability to analyse and synthesize information to understand issues and identify options.
  • Influencing and negotiation skills: Ability to promote ideas and persuasively; shape stakeholder opinions and negotiate skilfully to create the best outcome possible. Negotiate win-win solutions.
  • Business understanding: Ability to know the business and the mission-critical technical and functional skills needed to do the job; understands various types of business propositions and understands how businesses operate in general; learns new methods and technologies easily. Understands the organization’s business model and competitive position in the marketplace. Understands potential for growth and profitability.
  • Managing work processes: Ability to effectively design work flow, and systems; is good at figuring out what to measure to track progress; sets up systems that can almost manage themselves; is a master at the effectiveness and efficiency of work systems; can quickly diagnose and fix a work flow problem; always looking for incremental process improvement.
  • Organising & Planning: Ability to plan, organize and prioritize work, balancing resources, skills, priorities and time-scales to achieve objectives.
  • Project Management: Ability to bring projects to completion eliciting the collaborations of interdepartmental team members.
  • Plan for contingencies: Ability to pro actively identify potential problems and create contingency plans or work-rounds to implement if problems occur.
  • Industry Knowledge: Ability to know what it takes to be successful in this industry; have thorough knowledge of this industry’s history, customers, and competitive environment.
  • Active Listening: Ability to give full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.
  • High Impact Delivery: Ability to deliver clear, convincing, and well-organized presentations; project credibility and poise even in highly visible, adversarial situations.
  • Communicating Effectively: Ability to write and present effectively; adjusts to fit the audience and the message; strongly gets a message across.
  • Detailed Oriented: Ability to be well organized and resourceful, has the ability to reduce a complex concept or task into something that is manageable and clearly interpreted. is able to get things done with less and in less time; can work on multiple tasks at once without losing track; foresees and plans around obstacles.
  • Focusing on Action and Outcomes: Ability to attack everything with drive and energy with an eye on the bottom line; not afraid to initiate action before all the facts are known; drives to finish everything he/she starts.
  • Keeping on Point: Ability to quickly separate the mission-critical from the nice to dos and the trivial; quickly senses what's the next most useful thing to work on; focuses on the critical few tasks that really add value and puts aside or delays the rest.
  • Operates with Integrity – Ability to demonstrate honesty and behaves according to ethical principles; ensures that words and actions are consistent, behaves dependably across situations.
  • Time Management: Ability to manage one's own time and the time of others.
  • Motivating & Delegating: – Ability to manage people well; gets the most and best out of the people he/she has; sets and communicates guiding goals; measures accomplishments, holds people accountable, and gives useful feedback; delegates and develops; keeps people informed; provides coaching for today and for the future.
  • Inspiring Others: Ability to get individuals, teams and an entire organization to perform at a higher level and to embrace change; negotiates skilfully to achieve a fair outcome or promote a common cause; communicates a compelling vision and is committed to what needs to be done; inspires others; builds motivated, high-performing teams; understands what motivates different people.
  • Leads by Example: Ability to serve as a role model for the organization’s values; takes responsibility for delivering on commitment; gives proper credit to others; acknowledges own mistakes rather than blaming others.
  • Leadership: Ability to use personal skills to guide and inspire individuals/groups towards achieving goals.
  • Treats people fairly: Ability to treat all stakeholders with dignity, respect and fairness; listens to others without prejudging, objectively considers other people’s opinions.
  • Judgement and Decision Making: Ability to consider the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.
  • Team player: Ability to manage strong working relationships within the company. Able to complete tasks and work cooperatively with others.
  • Adaptability: Ability to respond and adapt to changing circumstances and to manage, solve problems and provide solutions in a climate of ambiguity.
  • Maximizes learning opportunities: Ability to actively participate in learning activities in a way that makes the most of the learning experience, such as taking notes, asking questions and critically analysing information; remains open to unplanned learning opportunities such as coaching from others.
  • Applies new knowledge or skill: Ability to use new knowledge, understanding, or skill to practical use on the job.
  • Flexibility: Ability to work in a fast paced environment.
  • Computer skills: Possesses intermediate to advanced Microsoft Suite Knowledge (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and Microsoft Project /Visio. 
So what does that tell us? Firstly that you if you are a UAT manager already you should be congratulate yourself on your impressive competencies. And secondly, abilities in testing or quality assurance are not really required for a role managing user acceptance testing.

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Acceptance testing framework

If you are interested in acceptance testing in the context of agile (in particular extreme programming) there is a workshop here that may interest you:

In recent times there has been a noticeable development in the body of knowledge around the concept of “ Automated Acceptance Testing” as described by Extreme Programming. In particular frameworks have begun to evolve that address the needs of automated acceptance-testing. However, most if not all of these frameworks are in their infancy. The concept behind this workshop is to draw on icipants experience to identify the features of such a framework were it to be fully mature i.e. the Ultimate Automated Acceptance Testing Framework.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

IEEE Acceptance Testing

There is a beta version of the IEEE Technology Navigator available. I found this page on resources related to Acceptance Testing. I didn't get a chance to read them all but there are 1.785 of them. Worth checking out if you are looking for resources for Acceptance Testing.

There are 72,490 resources related to performance testing and amazingly there are 284,074 related resources to testing! Hope these are useful resources.

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Biggest reasons Utility IT projects fail points to UAT

An article on Smart Grid News identified four key activities that resulted in successful programmes. These were requirements definition,, program governance, risk management and user acceptance testing.

Good set really. I would say all four of them are contributed to by effective acceptance testing (especially the UAT one of course).

For requirements defintion it said "Strong requirements definition is a must, but requirements also must adapt. Business requirements are rarely the same at the end of a project as they were at the outset due to changes in the market, customers, regulations and corporate leadership."

This is true of aceptance testing requirements definition. People often forget that the business acceptance criteria change and that what may have been acceptable at the start of a programme is no longer sutiable even though it perfectly matching the acceptance criteria of the delivery project.

For the User acceptance it said "IT is about empowering people. IT tools won’t work if users don’t adopt them. It is important to involve the user community from any program’s earliest stages and to perform acceptance testing that is measurable and encourages open communication."

This is true for the user aceptance test. I have heard of user acceptance tests that involved no users it is not a desirable approach.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Acceptance test benefits

I recently watched a webinar from SmartBear about the unexpected benefits of acceptance testing. You can read an overview of it here.

Anyway the topic looked at the long term benefits of acceptance testing (and to a degree regression testing too). They were benefits such as more cost-effective support, better positioning for business change and lower dependency on individuals.

All these are good benefits. I am think that to some they may be unexpected. But to everyone that has a long term interest in acceptance testing it is preaching to the choir. Still I think that the more people make a noise about the benefits of acceptance test activities the more people will adopt good practices in this area.

Friday, April 22, 2011

SAN user acceptance test

This is an extract from a question on SAN migration testing

In migration, you should consider several elements to form the questions you will use in the acceptance test. First you need to decide if the migration will be done while data is active or not. If you're planning to migrate while the data is not active, then you need to consider:

    After the migration, compare the data to be sure it transferred accurately.
    Are there pacing controls such that the migration can have less resources dedicated to it so more important jobs can finish?
    Can the migration be interrupted and then resumed without starting over?
    What configuration changes are required? Can the transition to the migrated device be done seamlessly?

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Acceptance testing news or just hot air?

I just had a quick look at organisations that issue news items which mention an Acceptance Test
.

Strange thing is it seems to be an areoplane kind of thing. First one I found was from Boeing about how they have copleted Site Acceptance Testing of a command and control system. The next one was about Areojet completing accepting testing of a mono-propeller rocket engine. And then there was another about Airtel, a company that is develops communications software for the aeronautical telecommunications network, who had completed acceptance testing of NAV Portugal’s Data Link Server.

I wonder why the aeronautical industry is so keen to tell us about its acceptance testing? Or maybe we should be asking why other business sectors are so reluctant to release news about acceptance testing.