UAT Environment

User Acceptance Testing, UAT for short, also goes by the name Demo or Demonstration.

If you have a somewhat typical set of environments setup to support software development, they will correspond roughly to the following:

Development (DEV)
Build
Integration (INT)
QA/Test
UAT
PreProduction
Production (PROD)

How these are used also varies slightly from one company to the next but some key concerns are addresses at each level.

Build ensures the code is in Version Control and always builds.

Integration ensures the code under development and third party code, software and legacy systems all still work together.

QA or Test validates the ever increasing feature development and bug fixes.

So it may seem like UAT is overkill. But it is precisely because the previous (lower) environments have checked out and passed on all these details that allows UAT to provide the first chance for the Customer to provide their feedback or approval. The system is in a state where it could be deployed , all of the bugs and issues have been resolved.

But it is precisely because the Customer is providing feedback here that Software Developers will be most insistent on gaining access to the system.

One reason is familiar, they need to fix something. The answer to this is the same as it was on QA, fixes should flow throught the process to keep the version integrity. (Although QA should have already found the bug so if this is a new bug, some investigation should be done to determine why QA missed it.)

Another reason is the Customer is changing their mind. Here Acceptance is called for, not only will the Customer change their wishes, they may never stop. Sometimes they flip flop between several implementations. Sometimes there is more than one customer and they cannot agree. In this case you will need to find a way to make the different options configurable. This will need to be documented in a Use Case and follow the process of every other enhancement.

But the best reason for keeping Developers off of UAT is to see "Can this solution live without the constant care and feeding by Developers?" Even better "Can mere mortal users actually use this system?"

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