Acceptance testing

Acceptance testing of an aircraft catapult
Six of the primary mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope being prepared for acceptance testing

In engineering and its various subdisciplines, acceptance testing is a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met. It may involve chemical tests, physical tests, or performance tests.[1]

In systems engineering, it may involve black-box testing performed on a system (for example: a piece of software, lots of manufactured mechanical parts, or batches of chemical products) prior to its delivery.[2]

In software testing, the ISTQB defines acceptance testing as:

Formal testing with respect to user needs, requirements, and business processes conducted to determine whether a system satisfies the acceptance criteria[3] and to enable the user, customers or other authorized entity to determine whether to accept the system.

— Standard Glossary of Terms used in Software Testing[4]: 2 

The final test in the QA lifecycle, user acceptance testing, is conducted just before the final release to assess whether the product or application can handle real-world scenarios. By replicating user behavior, it checks if the system satisfies business requirements and rejects changes if certain criteria are not met.[5]

Some forms of acceptance testing are, user acceptance testing (UAT), end-user testing, operational acceptance testing (OAT), acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) and field (acceptance) testing. Acceptance criteria are the criteria that a system or component must satisfy in order to be accepted by a user, customer, or other authorized entity.[6]

  1. ^ "BPTS - Is Business process testing the best name / description". SFIA. Retrieved February 18, 2023.
  2. ^ Black, Rex (August 2009). Managing the Testing Process: Practical Tools and Techniques for Managing Hardware and Software Testing. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-40415-7.
  3. ^ "acceptance criteria". Innolution, LLC. June 10, 2019.
  4. ^ "Standard Glossary of Terms used in Software Testing, Version 3.2: All Terms" (PDF). ISTQB. Retrieved November 23, 2020.
  5. ^ "User Acceptance Testing (UAT) - Software Testing". GeeksforGeeks. November 24, 2022. Retrieved May 23, 2024.
  6. ^ ISO/IEC/IEEE International Standard - Systems and software engineering. ISO/IEC/IEEE. 2010. pp. vol., no., pp.1–418.