UserGenix / What is UAT?

What is UAT, and how do you make a go/no-go decision?

User acceptance testing (UAT) is the last check before a change goes live: the people who will use it confirm it does what the business needs. A go/no-go decision is the call that follows, whether to release now, release with conditions, or hold.

What UAT means

UAT is testing done by the business, not by the delivery team. Real users or their representatives try the new or changed system against realistic scenarios and agreed acceptance criteria. The question they answer is not “does the software run?” but “can we run the business with this?”

The go/no-go decision

When UAT finishes, someone with the authority to decide has to answer one question: do we go live? Good decisions rest on evidence, not on how much testing happened. A pack for that meeting usually covers:

• what was in scope, and what was explicitly not;
• how many scenarios were planned, run, passed, failed or blocked;
• which defects are still open, how severe they are, and who has accepted any of them;
• the risks and blockers that remain; and
• the decision needed, who owns it, and by when.

The three common outcomes

Outcome	What it means
Go	The evidence supports releasing on the planned date.
Conditional go	Release can proceed if named conditions are met, for example a High defect is fixed and retested first.
No-go	The evidence does not support release. Hold, fix and retest.

Teams use their own wording and thresholds. What matters is that the outcome is clear, and that it matches the evidence.

Where go/no-go packs usually go wrong

• Activity instead of evidence. “We ran 200 tests” says little about whether the important ones passed.
• Blocked tests counted as passed. A test that could not run is a gap, not a result.
• Defects quietly treated as accepted. An open defect is not an accepted risk until a named business owner says so.
• An unsupported status. A Green rating with unresolved High defects needs challenging.
• A vague ask. Decision makers need to know what is being decided, by whom and by when.

How the UserGenix UAT builder helps

The UAT Go/No-Go Builder is a free tool. You answer a few short sections about your release and it prepares a structured request. You paste that request into an AI tool your organisation approves, and the AI drafts the pack. The request tells the AI to use only what you supply, to keep your reported status separate from its own assessment, and to say “Unknown” where evidence is missing.

1. Describe the release, scope, results, defects and the decision needed. Or start from an example.
2. Copy the request the builder creates.
3. Paste it into your AI tool and answer any questions it raises.
4. Review the pack carefully before anyone relies on it.

Using it safely

• Use sanitised content only. Leave out personal, confidential, security-sensitive or client-identifiable information.
• Use a role such as “Head of Payroll” rather than a name where you can.
• Follow your organisation’s policies on AI use before pasting anything into an AI tool.

For step-by-step help with the sister tool, see the documentation.