User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Lead / Analyst
Purpose
Plans, coordinates and executes user acceptance testing to confirm that a delivered system meets the agreed business requirements and is fit for production use. Acts as the bridge between business users, the project team and the vendor or development team, and provides the evidence behind the go/no-go acceptance decision.
Key responsibilities
- Develop the UAT strategy and plan: scope, approach, environments, test data, entry and exit criteria, schedule, roles and sign-off process.
- Translate business requirements, user stories and process maps into test scenarios, test cases and expected results, with a traceability matrix linking requirements to tests and outcomes.
- Prepare and manage test environments and test data, including role-based test accounts and anonymized or synthetic data.
- Recruit, brief and support business testers; run test kick-offs, daily check-ins and triage sessions.
- Execute and oversee test cycles, including end-to-end business process, role-based access, integration, reporting and regression testing.
- Log, classify and track defects with reproduction steps, evidence, severity, priority and owner; drive defects to resolution and verify fixes through re-test.
- Report test progress, coverage, defect trends and residual risk to the project manager and steering committee.
- Prepare the UAT summary report and acceptance recommendation; obtain formal business sign-off.
- Contribute to release readiness: cut-over checklists, training feedback, known-issues list and post-go-live support planning.
Skills and experience
- Experience planning and leading UAT for enterprise or SaaS applications, ideally in a vendor-delivered implementation.
- Strong understanding of the software testing lifecycle, test design techniques and defect management.
- Ability to read business requirements and process documentation and convert them into testable scenarios.
- Hands-on with test management and defect tracking tools (for example Jira, Azure DevOps, HP ALM, Zephyr, TestRail) and spreadsheet-based traceability.
- Working knowledge of integration testing concepts (APIs, interfaces, batch jobs, identity providers) and basic SQL for data validation.
- Clear written reporting and the confidence to present findings and a go/no-go recommendation to senior stakeholders.
- Organized, detail-oriented, and comfortable coordinating business users who are testing alongside their day jobs.
Nice to have
- ISTQB Foundation or equivalent testing certification.
- Experience with Agile or hybrid delivery methodologies.
- Domain experience in the relevant sector (for example higher education, public sector, finance).
- Familiarity with test automation tools or scripting for regression support.
