Acceptance test: Encyclopedia - Acceptance test

Acceptance test

[noun phrase] An acceptance test in engineering is a test that a user/sponsor and manufacturer/producer jointly perform on a finished, engineered product/system through black-box testing (i.e., the user or tester need not know anything about the internal workings of the system). It is often referred to as a(n) functional test, beta test, QA test, application test, confidence test, final test, or end user test. It is also sometimes split into a factory acceptance test and/or a site or field acceptance test, the former being run within the manufacturer's facilities, the latter at the user's site, within the user's environment.

[verb phrase] To test a manufactured, engineered system and, based on the results, either grant or not grant acceptance of the system by the sponsor/user from the manufacturer/producer.

Acceptance tests generally take the form of a suite of tests designed to be run on the completed system. Each individual test exercises a particular operating condition of the user's environment, or a feature of the system, known as a case. And each test case has a boolean outcome: pass or fail. There is generally no degree of success or failure. The test environment is usually designed to be identical, or as close as possible, to the anticipated user's environment. These case tests must each be accompanied by test case input data and/or a formal description of the operational activities to be performed— intended to thoroughly exercise the specific case— and a formal description of the expected results. The acceptance test (suite) is run against the supplied input data and/or an actual environment using an acceptance test script to direct the testers, and the results obtained are compared with the expected results. If there is a correct match for every case, the test is said to pass. If not, the system may either be rejected or accepted on conditions previously agreed between the sponsor and the manufacturer.

The objective is to provide confidence that the delivered system meets the business requirements of the sponsors and users. The acceptance phase may also act as the final quality gateway, where any quality defects not previously detected may be uncovered.

A principal purpose of the acceptance test is that, once completed successfully, and provided certain additional (contractually agreed) acceptance criteria are met, the sponsors will then sign off on the system as satisfying the contract (previously agreed between sponsor and manufacturer), and deliver final payment.

Categories: Systems testing | Software testing

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Acceptance test", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki