What is Acceptance Testing in Software Testing?

There are certain levels of software testing. One of them is Acceptance testing. Acceptance testing is a level of software testing where a system is checked for its acceptability. To make the concept clearer, let us head towards understanding the topic in detail.

Have a look at the agenda for this article:

• What is acceptance testing?
• Various forms of acceptance testing
• Who performs acceptance testing?
• Criteria for acceptance testing

Let’s begin!

What is acceptance testing?

Ever came across the term – Black box testing? Well, this method is used in acceptance testing.
Acceptance testing is one of the levels of software testing. The purpose of this test is to evaluate the system’s compliance with the business requirements and calculate whether it is acceptable at the user end.

For your better understanding, here is a simple example:
Consider the manufacturing of a chair. Wood, steel, plastic, paints, are the items needed for its manufacture. These units are separately produced and unit tested. After that, these units are combined together, and integration testing is performed. After the integration process, system testing is performed. System testing is followed by acceptance testing where the final product is matched with the requirements of the end-users.

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Moving on, let us know the different types of acceptance testing.

Various forms of acceptance testing

1. User Acceptance Testing (UAT):
User acceptance testing is used to determine whether the product is working as per the requirements of the user correctly. Requirements as per the customers are picked up specifically for this purpose. This is also called as End-User Testing.

2. Alpha Testing:
Alpha testing is used to determine the product in the development testing environment by a team of testers, and they are often called as alpha testers.

3. Beta Testing:
In order to assess the product by exposing it to the real end-users, beta testing is done. After that feedback is taken from the users and the defects are fixed. It helps the product to provide a better user experience.

4. Business Acceptance Testing (BAT):
To check if the product meets the business goals or not, is tested by BAT. BAT mainly focuses on business profits gained which are challenging due to the fluctuating market conditions and the ever-changing technologies.

5. Contract Acceptance Testing (CAT):
CAT is a contract which specifies that once the product is live, within a specific time period, the acceptance test must be performed and it should pass all the acceptance use cases.

6. Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT):
OAT is non-functional testing used to determine the operational readiness of the product. It mainly includes testing of compatibility, maintainability, reliability etc.
OAT assures the stability of the product before it is released to the end-users.

After getting a brief knowledge about various forms let us move towards our next segment.

Who performs acceptance testing?

There are two categories of teams which performs acceptance testing:
● Internal Acceptance Testing
● External Acceptance Testing

Internal Acceptance Testing:
The members of the organization who are indirectly involved in the development of the software fall under the category of Internal Acceptance Testing. E.g.; Testing, developing team.

External Acceptance Testing:
The members of the organization who are not the employees of the organization but are involved in the development of the software are involved in External Acceptance Testing:
● Customer acceptance testing:
The software that is developed by the customers of the organization.
● User acceptance testing:
This testing is done by the end-users.

After this, I will discuss the criteria of the acceptance testing.

Criteria for acceptance testing

Acceptance criteria is defined on the basis of the following:
● Data Integrity
● Usability
● Performance
● Scalability
● Documentation
● Functional Correctness and Completeness
● Confidentiality and Availability
● Data Conversion
● Timeliness

With this, I am concluding the blog here. I hope the content explained above helped you in some way. Keep exploring, keep reading!

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