Reviewing the benefits of UAT

There are several benefits to UAT. I will list a few that I found useful:

• Business users get a chance to verify and validate that the software functionality meets the business requirements. In addition to identifying defects, it helps the project get feedback and suggestions from business users. The project team can decide on whether to incorporate the requests in the same release or a future release based on impact assessment.
• This is our last and only chance to find defects before deploying to the production environment and thus reduce risk. Being knowledgeable about the testing process, they can find it fast and be able to explain how, when, why, and where they found the defect so that it can be reproduced and fixed faster. If this defect is missed during testing, it may result in different end users from different departments experiencing the same issues after deployment to production. The same issues may be described in different ways...