#116 | ITGC User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Approval – Good Documentation

Hello, everyone! In this session, I’m going to be reviewing with you the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Approval and what is considered good documentation. This is taking it from the perspective of the IT person or the process owner who has to save this documentation as evidence for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance.

I suggest you watch the video. It’s easier to understand if you are a visual/audio learner. The content below is the same as the video. It’s for those who learn by reading.

Good Example of Documented UAT

I’m going to walk you through different screenshots to show an example of a good, documented UAT. The first part is a ticket that comes out of the ticketing system and has the requested change. So, this is a user who said, “Please add a prompt for the GL that accepts multiple values separated by commas.”

Now, the IT person replies and has additional questions or comments, which creates some back and forth dialogue. Now, what we want to see is a clarifying question.

What’s good about this particular ticket is you see the request and IT processing the business requirements. The user requirements help to provide evidence that it wasn’t just “Implement this without thought about the consequences.”

IT Professionals think about these things when they implement changes. But if it’s not in the documentation, clarifying questions are in order.

Next question is “Has the IT person done it?” In the same ticketing system, IT said, “I finished development for the report. Please test it and let me know your comments.” IT is requesting the UAT of the user.

Finally, the person doing UAT is now doing various tests and came up with similar results. They have completed it and did a screenshot to say, “Looks good. Please release to production.”

Testing is done. The user even shared what they have done. Now, the developer said, “This is what you should see.” The user goes in and does some sample tests and they come up with something that looks like what should be in this screenshot. Finally what you see at the bottom is the evidence of approval to put into production.

The user is saying, “This is looking good.” On the IT side, they are saying, “Approved. It’s in production, and it’s done.”

These are the elements that you want to save when you are doing documentation for User Acceptance Testing. That is good evidence.

I hope this was helpful. Look out for the next installment of this series next week when we give more practical tips on documentation. Have a great day!