Acceptance Testing

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Acceptance testing is the final exam of a software development project. The title of this type of testing has a very positive meaning; however, there is no guarantee of acceptance. An acceptance test suite is intended to exercise the system in its target environment under standard loads with standard user interaction patterns.

Acceptance testing merits having its activity oval present at the highest level software development process flow due to its importance. A course syllabus will likely prominently mention the final exam along with its large influence on the final course grade calculation. In the same way, the acceptance test (AKA FQT test suite in government contract contexts) is the final criteria gating mechanism before a software product enters the world.

Depending on the contract that exists between the developing organization and customer organization, "acceptance" may mean different things. Acceptance may mean complete approval of the customer according to their own subjective criteria (This is evidence of a deficient contract in my opinion). On the other hand, acceptance may mean passing a test given an optimal situation where the developing organization is able to develop their own acceptance test suite with minimal input from the customer and conduct all test execution on the developer organization's own site. More likely, acceptance will lie somewhere between these two extremes. An expected outcome of acceptance testing (given that the contract allows this outcome) is that the customer organization will accept the product pending the fulfillment of some conditions (like providing fixes for a set of critical errors within a specified time period). If a product is not considered acceptable under any condition by the customer organization, then there will likely be some major rework needed. That is why the software development process shows failure at this stage causing the flow to regress all of the way back to architecture design and detailed design.

V-Model Diagram

The acceptance testing test plan creation activity should start as the system requirements and system specificaton artifacts become relatively stable and mature.

V-Model Diagram - Acceptance Testing PNG Requirements are first stated in prose. They are then elaborated using requirement specification templates. For this software development process, the system specification artifact is a document that captures development artifacts generated during requirements engineering phase that will be instrumental to the later development phases. The system testing procedure tests for errors resulting from unexpected interactions among sub-systems and system components. Acceptance testing is the final exam of a software development project. The title of this type of testing has a very positive meaning; however, there is no guarantee of acceptance. An acceptance test suite is intended to exercise the system in its target environment under standard loads with standard user interaction patterns.

No part of this work should be produced or used without the permission of the authors: Michael Turner and Dr. Sharon A White.