Acceptance Testing

Acceptance testing is a software testing phase that assesses whether a software application or system meets the specified acceptance criteria and is ready for release to the end users or stakeholders. It is a crucial step in the software development life cycle (SDLC) and typically comes after the completion of system testing and before production deployment.

The primary goal of acceptance testing is to ensure that the software meets the business requirements and functions as intended from the user’s perspective. Acceptance testing helps ensure that the software meets the end-user’s and stakeholders’ needs and expectations before it is officially deployed in a production environment, reducing the risk of critical issues and customer dissatisfaction post-release.

Types of Acceptance Testing:

1. User Acceptance Testing (UAT): User acceptance testing determines whether the product works correctly for the user. Specific requirements often used by the customers are primarily picked for testing purposes. This is also termed as End-User Testing.
2. Business Acceptance Testing (BAT): BAT is used to determine whether the product meets the business goals and purposes or not. BAT mainly focuses on business profits, which are challenging due to the changing market conditions and new technologies. Therefore, the current implementation may have to be changed, resulting in extra budgets.
3. Contract Acceptance Testing (CAT): CAT is a contract that specifies that once the product goes live within a predetermined period, the acceptance test must be performed. It should pass all the acceptance use cases. Here is a contract termed a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which includes the terms that the payment will be made only if the Product services are in line with all the requirements, which means the contract is fulfilled. Sometimes, this contract happens before the product goes live. There should be a well-defined contract in terms of the testing period, areas of testing, conditions on issues encountered at later stages, payments, etc.
4. Regulations Acceptance Testing (RAT): RAT determines whether the product violates the rules and regulations defined by the country’s government where it is being released. This may be unintentional but will impact negatively on the business. Generally, the product or application to be released in the market must go under RAT, as different countries or regions have different rules and regulations defined by their governing bodies. If any laws and regulations are violated for any country, then that country or the specific region then the product will not be released in that country or region. Only the product vendors will be directly responsible if the product is released despite a violation.
5. Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT): OAT is used to determine the operational readiness of the product and is non-functional testing. It mainly includes testing recovery, compatibility, maintainability, reliability, etc. OAT assures the stability of the product before it is released to production.
6. Alpha Testing:Alpha Testing is used to determine the product in the development testing environment by a specialized testers team, usually called alpha testers.
7. Beta Testing: Beta testing is used to assess the product by exposing it to actual end-users, usually called beta testers in their environment. Feedback is collected from the users, and the defects are fixed. Also, this helps in enhancing the product to give a rich user experience.

Advantages of Acceptance Testing :

• This testing helps the project team to know the further requirements of the users directly as it involves the users for testing.
• We have automated test execution.
• It brings confidence and satisfaction to the clients as they are directly involved in the testing process.
• It is easier for the user to describe their requirement.
• It covers only the Black-Box testing process; hence, the entire product functionality will be tested.

Disadvantages of Acceptance Testing :

• Users should have basic knowledge about the product or application.
• Sometimes, users want to refrain from participating in the testing process.
• The feedback for the testing takes a long time as it involves many users, and the opinions may differ from one user to another user.
• The development team does not participate in this testing process.

In this Software Testing Tutorial, we will learn what is acceptance testing. User Acceptance testing is very important phase in software testing as this is the phase where customer/business verifies if the requirements meet the acceptance criteria or fulfil customers needs.

Watch Video Tutorial below on Acceptance Testing