Activity: Manage Acceptance Test

Purpose To ensure that the developed product to fulfills its acceptance criteria at both the development, and target installation site.
Steps Ensure Readiness for Formal Test Initiate Testing Review Results and Dispose Anomalies
Input Artifacts: Configuration Audit Findings Deployment Plan Product Acceptance Plan Test Evaluation Summary Development Infrastructure	Resulting Artifacts: Change Request Development Infrastructure
Role: Deployment Manager

Workflow Details:

Deployment

Manage Acceptance Test

Ensure Readiness for Formal Test

Acceptance testing is formal testing conducted to determine whether or not a system satisfies its acceptance criteria, and to enable the customer, user or authorized entity to determine whether or not to accept the system.

Acceptance testing is often conducted at the development site, and then at the customer site using the target environment.

How the customer evaluates the deliverable artifacts, to determine whether they meet predefined set of acceptance criteria, is described in the Product Acceptance Plan. The Product Acceptance Plan describes the roles, responsibilities, required resources, tasks, test cases and acceptance criteria required to determine the acceptability of the product.

Another useful input to determining the project's readiness for formal test are the Configuration Audit Findings that report on:

Deficiencies in the Configuration Audit Findings could result in the Acceptance Test being postponed. The Deployment Manager should review minor deficiencies with the customer, for whose benefit the formal tests are conducted, to determine whether testing should proceed.

The System Administrator needs to ensure that the infrastructure (hardware and software resources), and support software is ready for the upcoming test activities.

Initiate Testing

Once the Deployment Manager is satisfied with respect to readiness of all items that need to be tested, he follows the agreed upon test schedule outlined in the Product Acceptance Plan. Testing begins when all participants required for witnessing and running the test are present.

The Tester loads all the software and test data files, and proceeds with the testing using the collection of test cases, test procedures, test scripts, and expected test results in the test model. Test results are recorded together with any discrepancies between the expected and actual results.

Review Results and Dispose Anomalies

Test results should be reviewed at the end of each day at a Test Results Review Meeting. At this meeting, results for each test case need to be reviewed and noted as being "acceptable" or "not acceptable". The minutes of the meeting need to record any significant discussions and decisions.

In case of the test results that are considered to be "unacceptable", the Deployment Manager can raise Change Requests for the anomalies, and submit them as part of Change Control mechanism for review by the Change Control Board.