Acceptance testing explained

Senior Technical Content Marketing Manager
Acceptance testing is a software testing methodology that verifies that an application meets business and functional requirements. Often the last stage of testing before software is released, acceptance testing aims to minimize defects, enforce quality standards, and validate that the software meets design specifications and regulatory requirements.
What is acceptance testing?
Acceptance testing defines testable requirements known as acceptance criteria. Applications must pass tests to showcase that they meet all acceptance criteria before release.
Many different forms of software testing can be employed to validate if an application meets acceptance criteria. For example, unit and integration testing can be used as part of acceptance testing to test the performance and functionality of software components.
Acceptance tests verify whether or not the system behaves as intended by its stakeholders during typical usage. These stakeholders may include business interests, developers, end users, and others involved in building or using the software.
Stakeholders work together to determine the acceptance criteria for the application. These criteria are then tested using automated and manual testing procedures. The expectations of most acceptance testing include:
- The application meets all functional and business requirements as determined by stakeholders.
- Software is reliable, performant, and behaves as intended by designers.
- As much as possible, the application is free of serious defects that would impact user experience.
- Ensuring the application meets or exceeds all security standards.
- The application complies with all relevant regulatory requirements.
Types of acceptance testing
Many different processes can be categorized as forms of acceptance testing. Four of the most common types of acceptance testing are:
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT): End-users and stakeholders manually test the application to ensure it meets expectations and offers the intended user experience.
- Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT): Developers use manual and automated testing to verify the application’s operational readiness. Tests scrutinize performance, security, and usability. DevOps teams validate that the application will perform as intended once deployed to its operational environment.
- Contract acceptance testing: Developers create tests to validate that the system meets contractual requirements. These tests ensure that the system is functional and performant enough to fulfill contractual obligations for clients and end-users, such as maintaining a performance or uptime specification defined in a contract like a Service-Level Agreement (SLA).
- Regulatory and compliance testing: Stakeholders verify through automated and manual testing that the application meets all regulatory requirements from local or international law. Compliance testing ensures the application meets the organization’s compliance requirements and adheres to industry standards.
Key components of acceptance testing
Acceptance testing has three primary components. First, teams agree on what to test for. Next, the actual testing begins. Finally, teams analyze the test results and communicate the findings to stakeholders.
Let’s take a closer look at these three components.
Test planning
During test planning, stakeholders collaborate to determine acceptance criteria. The acceptance criteria dictate the requirements of the application and set up the goals of acceptance testing.
More than simply outlining how the application should behave, test planning aims to determine testable goals. Abstract project goals or wish lists of possible features do not always translate well to testable acceptance criteria.
Stakeholders and engineers should collaborate to find the best solutions for creating acceptance criteria that reflect the project’s goals and the practical realities of testing.
Test planning should consider OAT, UAT, and contractual and regulatory testing as distinct phases. Strategies and resource requirements vary between these testing methods, necessitating forethought and planning to execute effectively.
Test execution
During test execution, testing is performed to validate that the application meets the acceptance criteria defined in the test planning phase.
Test execution often includes a combination of manual and automated testing. In manual testing, stakeholders, users, and Quality Assurance (QA) teams work through scenarios that simulate how real users interact with the application as part of UAT. They test common usage scenarios and edge cases to identify potential defects and assess the quality of the software.
For automated testing, developers write software tests to verify that the application meets requirements. These types of tests often address individual components of the software, such as subjecting specific sections of code to unit tests or simulating detailed scenarios using system testing to understand the application’s behavior as a whole. Automated tests are often key for validating OAT, but can also be utilized for UAT.
The testing pyramid methodology combines automated testing practices to provide a framework for holistically testing applications, providing a granular approach to testing different system components and their interactions.
Test reporting
Once testing is complete, stakeholders analyze the results to determine if the application meets the acceptance criteria.
If all acceptance criteria are met, the application is ready for release. For any tests that do not meet the criteria, the reporting from those tests is used to analyze the issue and develop a solution for modifying the application to meet those criteria.
Benefits of acceptance testing
Acceptance testing provides assurances that developers are releasing good software. Defining acceptance criteria creates opportunities for collaboration and inter-team communication, bringing all hands on deck to focus on the quality of the application.
Benefits of effective acceptance testing include:
- Ensuring software meets business requirements: Well-defined and testable acceptance criteria align development goals with business requirements.
- Enhancing user satisfaction and confidence: Acceptance testing incorporates QA teams and end-user testing to validate that the software meets user expectations in real-world scenarios.
- Reducing the risk of post-deployment issues: Stringent testing helps to minimize defects and squash bugs early before they lead to serious issues.
Acceptance testing process
Behind any effective acceptance testing is a well-articulated process of defining requirements, designing and executing tests, and collecting data.
One of the key benefits of acceptance testing is not just the testing itself, but the thoroughness of the planning. Testing is not just an afterthought, but a core principle of the design, setting up expectations as testable acceptance criteria and structuring the development process around the requirements specified at the beginning of the process.
Let’s explore the acceptance testing process end-to-end.
Requirements analysis
Before testing begins, requirements must be clearly articulated into testable acceptance criteria. This process necessitates collaboration between business and technical teams to assess requirements, determine the project’s scope, and define the acceptance criteria.
Acceptance criteria vary widely and are unique to each project, team, and application. Typical acceptance criteria include ensuring parity between business requirements and application functionality, validating that the application meets certain performance metrics, and ensuring the user experience matches design specifications.
Other acceptance criteria might focus on ensuring the presentation matches the company’s branding, or validating that the application has accessibility features.
Ideal acceptance criteria can be tested for programmatically through automated software testing. However, not all acceptance criteria can be validated through automated testing, necessitating manual reviews, QA teams, and UAT practices.
Test environment setup
For testing to take place, DevOps teams need to create dedicated testing environments. These private versions of the application can be subjected to automated and manual testing.
For systems and end-to-end testing, test environments should simulate the real-world conditions and infrastructure that the application will run on. Finer-grained tests like unit tests can sometimes be performed in the developers’ local environments to satisfy OAT.
Techniques for UAT often require QA demo environments that closely resemble the production environment and enable users to explore the application organically.
Test case development
For every acceptance criteria, one or multiple test cases need to be developed. Test cases are specific scenarios for testing.
As an example, if an acceptance criteria is that users can log into a service from both iOS and Android devices, two test cases are generated. In one test, an iOS device attempts to log in to the application, and in the other, an Android device attempts to log in to the application.
Test execution and validation
Most acceptance testing combines manual and automated methods. A typical workflow for acceptance testing might look like this:
- A developer changes their code and pushes the new code to a Git repository.
- Once the new code is reviewed and approved, it is merged into the main branch. This merge triggers the CI/CD pipeline.
- The CI/CD pipeline builds the new code and runs all automated acceptance testing. Unit tests, integration tests, and other forms of automated testing execute each time the pipeline is triggered.
- Alerts are generated for any test failures or other issues. Developers can review reports to identify problems and fix errors.
- Any manual testing is performed after the automated testing. CI/CD pipelines can be configured to only deploy changes with manual approvals, enabling QA and other manual tests to be completed before deploying new code.
Defect management
The multi-pronged approach of acceptance testing is likely to reveal defects in the form of bugs, errors, and performance issues.
These may be simple enough to address, such as fixing the presentation of the app’s user interface to match branding standards, or remedying simple bugs in the code that are an expected part of development.
More serious issues could include systemic problems affecting performance and scalability, or errors implementing business logic and other essential functions. These problems may require major changes in both the application and project planning.
Test closure and sign-off
Once all tests have been completed, and if necessary repeated during defect management procedures, the team can write a test closure report and sign off on the final results of the testing.
Specific timelines and goals should be set for test closure. Without a well-defined plan, testing can occur ad infinitum, producing little value with unnecessary or repetitive tests.
The final sign-off indicates that the teams responsible for testing have performed their due diligence in testing for all the acceptance criteria. It is an endorsement that the testing process was completed to satisfaction and the application is ready for release.
Challenges in acceptance testing
Here are some common challenges teams face in getting the most from their acceptance testing strategy:
- Unclear requirements make it difficult to determine test cases.
- Changing requirements throughout the project can disrupt test planning.
- UAT methods often necessitate a high level of manual QA testing. This can constrain resources and create challenges in aligning schedules.
- Some acceptance criteria may be difficult to test for, necessitating a complex approach to validate the criteria.
- Subjective interpretations of criteria or the application’s user experience can lead to disagreements and complications.
Best practices for effective acceptance testing
Here are some general best practice guidelines to set your acceptance testing up for success:
- Involving stakeholders early and often: Stakeholder input should be incorporated throughout the process, from the first stages of formulating acceptance criteria to the final processes of test closure.
- Maintaining clear and open communication: Effective testing is a collaborative process. Strong intra- and inter-team communications ensure every detail is addressed and the project benefits from unique perspectives.
- Using real-world scenarios for testing: Test cases should imitate real-world conditions that end-users will encounter. Teams should understand how users interact with their applications and try to predict the issues they might encounter.
- Automating where possible to increase efficiency: Automated testing can eliminate many tedious hours of manual testing. An automated test is also a repeatable test that can be performed each time the project is built. Any scenario that can be automatically tested should be, leaving manual testing to fill in the remaining gaps.
Integrating CI/CD into acceptance testing
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is an indispensable methodology for any DevOps team involved in software testing. By building a CI/CD pipeline that automates the process of merging code changes, building the application, executing tests, and collecting the reports in one place, developers can streamline the testing process and alleviate themselves of significant toil.
Continuous integration (CI) tools allow developers to create a detailed suite of tests executed each time the code is built. Developers can create solutions and implement in code them without worrying about the overhead of manually performing dozens or hundreds of different tests each time they make a change.
CI serves OAT very well, assisting developers in validating the application’s logic and features through unit tests and other automated forms of testing.
The practice of Continuous Delivery (CD) ensures that new code is always in a tested and ready-to-release state. This is ideal for expediting all testing processes. CD assists during manual testing, ensuring changes are always ready for QA teams to test.
CI/CD is crucial for speeding up feedback and iteration cycles. It enhances the quality of the software and constantly validates its reliability through automated testing.
Conclusion
Acceptance testing helps ensure that software meets business requirements, behaves as intended, and provides a high-quality experience for the end user.
Through a combination of different testing techniques and a structured planning process, acceptance testing assures teams that software is ready for release. CI/CD is an indispensable tool in the arsenal of acceptance testing, giving developers the ability to automate testing and expedite feedback cycles.
The combination of effective testing and great CI/CD is a recipe for success no matter the scale of your development project. Sign up for a free CircleCI account to see the benefits of CI/CD for yourself.