You’re testing a user registration page on a website to ensure that new users are able to set up their account easily. You build a test that checks to make sure that users can: Congratulations, you’ve just automated a user acceptance test. But what is user acceptance testing (UAT)? And why is it important for QA testers to understand? In this article, we’ll walk you through everything a QA tester should know about user acceptance testing.

Here’s a scenario: You’re a QA tester building automated tests for a new online email app. One test case requires you to confirm that the email reply button is working correctly. The challenge is that the email thread updates dynamically without changing its web address URL, complicating the process by limiting the effectiveness of using CSS selectors alone. So what else can you do? The answer: It’s time to bring in XPath selectors.