User acceptance testing

Hi all,

I have been tasked with finding out about user acceptance testing for
work and so I am looking for any good resources that you may know of.  I
have tried google but it hasn't turned up much.  If you could recommend
any websites/books/articles/newsgroups I'd be much obliged.


Many thanks in advance


Mat Taylor

Mat Taylor wrote:

> I have been tasked with finding out about user acceptance testing for
> work and so I am looking for any good resources that you may know of.  I
> have tried google but it hasn't turned up much.  If you could recommend
> any websites/books/articles/newsgroups I'd be much obliged.

That is one of the fastest growing sectors of the programming tools
industry, and it's strange you found nothing of interest. Start here:

http://fitnesse.org

Whoever among your bosses is interested in the user-level features can enter
data into that web site. You then wire the site's back-end to a build of
your program, forming an "alternate user interface". If your program
calculates statistics, for example, that site would store a table of inputs
and their expected standard deviation. Test fixtures then bypass the GUI,
insert these data directly, collect the output, and compare it to the
results. You can write hundreds of pages that satisfy anyone's curiosity
about the program. Run all these tests before committing any code changes.

Warning: Some people say "user acceptance test" when they really mean "GUI
tests". Such tests show that the outermost layer of your GUI performs
correctly. Those tests are less important if your program carefully
decouples the GUI appearance from its logic, and puts the latter into a
module that can be tested directly. A business program has little need for
complex GUI controls requiring their own tests.

--
Phlip
[url]http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ZLand[/url]