Acceptance Testing: How to Predict a Real-life Experience

by Tetiana Sukmanik | May 20, 2020 10:28 am

Acceptance Testing is one of the ways to improve the target customers’ experience. Nowadays it is important as more and more companies try to meet the requirements of their target customers. This article may be useful for those, who want to get acquainted with this kind of testing and its main notions.

Acceptance Testing[1] – a level of software testing which includes acceptability testing of a system. It is a relatively new type of testing. It is performed taking into account customers` needs and requirements.

Acceptance Testing aims at estimation of a system`s accordance with the customers’ requirements and system`s meeting the criteria to decide whether or not to accept the system. Like Unit Testing[2], Acceptance Testing has a binary result.

Acceptance Testing Process

The process of Acceptance Testing takes place after the system tests but before its launching.
The acceptance template consists of such stages:

• Plan
• Test
• Record
• Compare
• Result

Types of Acceptance Testing

There are such types of acceptance testing:

• User Acceptance Testing (UAT), also called beta or end-user testing – assessing to makes sure that the system operates in the way it is supposed to according to the user requirements. The term User here denotes people supposed to use this program. All the testing is performed from the point of view of target users. Being a crucial part of release cycle, this type is widespread nowadays.
  Similar to system testing[3], UAT tools include QC, JIRA etc. UAT methodologies involve not only conventional ones, but also new types, e.g. crowd testing.
• Business Acceptance Testing (BAT) is conducted to check whether the product meets the financial requirements of customers. This testing type is quite demanding because of constantly changing market conditions.
• Regulations Acceptance Testing (RAT) also called Compliance Acceptance Testing aims at assessing whether the product violates the government laws and rules stated by the country the product is released in.RAT is normally performed for the products released all over the world. If the product violates any rules of any country, the country doesn’t allow to use the product and the product is considered as Failure.
• Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT) means assessing the operational preparedness of the product. It involves testing such criteria: compatibility, maintainability, reliability etc.

Benefits

Acceptance Testing has several benefits:

• measuring the external product quality;
• discovering the defects skipped during previous testing;
• boosting closer interaction between developers and target customers or users
• providing the clear and unanimous testing agreements between customers and developers;
• decreasing the risk of new flaws or flaws which were previously checked and considered acceptable.

Disadvantages

There are some disadvantages of this elaborate process:

• the automated acceptance tests development is a demanding process;
• it is a time-consuming process as it implies checking a “real world” implementation;
• it can be very costly;

To Summarize

Acceptance Testing is the final testing stage which completes the process of software testing. As it is performed by the target consumers,it helps the developers to meet their demands and provides a better understanding of their requirements.

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Source URL: https://blog.qatestlab.com/2020/05/20/acceptancetesting/

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