Every Agile User Story has an associated User Acceptance Test (UAT). UATs are vital to the Agile process, as they define the scope of the project and prevent it becoming open-ended.

 

When all the User Acceptance Tests defined by the customer pass, then the system does what they want. And you can send them that invoice.

 

However, projects are Agile because they can change direction quickly if that’s what the customer wants. As all developers know, however, last-minute changes to a project can be risky as they can break other parts of the system. And checking everything still works is time-consuming.

 

At least, it used to be time-consuming. But now we can take each User Acceptance Test and automate it so that it can be re-run again and again throughout the project and beyond. This means we don’t just know that our systems do what our customers want, we also know that our systems are still doing what our customers wanted, days, weeks, even years after the project is finished.