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The Testing stage of development serves two useful purposes.
In a perfect world, your development testing would be rigorous enough to release a perfectly functional application to the customer. Unfortunately, in the real world this rarely ever happens. You should expect that user testing will find errors that you did not find while conducting development testing. Users will often use the application in unexpected ways, or inadvertently enter wrong data that may affect the operation of your application. No matter how rigorous your development testing may be, a larger community of users will often find errors that you missed.
Beyond finding additional errors, however, it is not unusual for a customer to realize that the way they expected the application to work turned out to be inconvenient or difficult for the end user to operate properly. The application may be exactly what the customer asked for, but they may not have fully understood how end users would respond to the application. Again, this is not uncommon. The testing stage, therefore, is useful for catching the end-user objections that arise in day-to-day use.
Setting Up the Test
In order to make the Testing Stage as productive as possible, there are a few practices you should consider.
The customer can select a relatively small number of users to take part in the testing. The best test users are those who are familiar with the existing process that you're replacing, so that they have at least a conceptual understanding of what your application is designed to do.
Test users should also be comfortable with documenting any errors, dislikes, or other comments that they can pass onto both the customer and you. The success of your testing is going to be highly reliant on the users' observations, and you and the customer should be committed to responding to the test users' concerns.
Provide some basic training on the application for the testers, both to introduce them to your application, and to ensure they understand the basics of how to use it. The training should cover the basics of using the application, without being too detailed. Don't try to train them on every single aspect of the application, to avoid coloring their perceptions about how to use it. Leave some space for them to feel comfortable with experimenting with how the application works.
Once the Testing Stage has been set up, you can export the application from the Development Server to the Staging Server. Once the application has been imported into the Staging Server, you can give the test users access to it, and allow them to begin using it.
The Test Process
The length of the Testing Stage may be highly variable. A complicated application may take much more time to test properly than a simple application. The Testing Stage should be long enough to ensure that you have enough time to have the users adequately test the application, and for you to make changes based on any user feedback you receive.
During the Testing Stage, you should regularly collect user feedback, and, with the approval of your customer, make any necessary changes to the application. You can go about this in a couple of ways.
You can have multiple phases of testing, where each phase takes a specified amount of time, during which you gather user feedback. At the end of each phase, you can make changes to the application, then start the next phase of feedback. This method provides less timely response to user feedback but enables you to collect a list of changes that can be implemented at the same time. This is a useful method for complex applications where a change in one part of the application affects another part. This method enables you to make changes in a more orderly fashion.
Alternatively, you can run the Testing Stage in a single phase and make changes immediately from user feedback as it arises. This method is more immediately responsive to user feedback but means that you may be constantly revising the application once or more per day. This method may be appropriate for a simple application, where changes may be less troublesome to implement.
In both cases, you should make all changes on your Development system, then re-import the application to the Staging System.
Customer Communication
You should communicate regularly with your customer to ensure that they understand and approve of any changes you make. Good communication with the customer about user feedback and proposed changes is very important.
User feedback is very important, but not all feedback may be wise to implement. The customer may decide that some user feedback should not be included, because the change is unacceptable for business reasons. You may decide that some requests are not technically possible to implement. Both you and the customer must understand what feedback should and should not be implemented and why.
Once both you and the customer decide that the Testing Stage has adequately ensured the application is functional and usable, you are ready to move to the Release Stage of development.
Continue to the Release Stage of the application development process.
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