Suppose you are a chef in the country’s biggest software developing company, and you come up with a new software idea after days and days of trial and error. This new software means a lot to you, and it’s finally ready to serve the customers. However, your team decided to do a customer survey on how well they liked it and most importantly, if they think some features of the software can be improved.
As a result, you get the most wonderful responses and some brilliant suggestions. This is exactly what acceptance testing is. Let us tell you all about acceptance testing, its types, and its pros & cons in this post. Hop on!
What Is Acceptance Testing?
Now that you have the gist of acceptance testing understanding its details will not be difficult. Acceptance testing is one of the many branches of software testing carried out by normal users and not the professional testing team itself. As the name suggests, acceptance testing is the test for the acceptability of the product by the real-end users.
It is conducted using acceptance testing software with the Black-box testing approach, which means all the product functionalities are tested without any knowledge of internal system codes or a deep understanding of the languages and programming. The main aim of the acceptance testing is to determine compliance of the product with business requirements and users’ demands, to check if the requirements match the product or not and to evaluate if it is ready for launch or not.
Types Of Acceptance Testing?
Acceptance testing is the final step before the official launch of the product, thus it needs to be precise and without fault and leniency. While conducting acceptance testing, there are multiple criteria to focus on, like user acceptance and regulations acceptance. The following are different types of acceptance testing:
- Alpha Testing
- Beta Testing
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
- Business Acceptance Testing (BAT)
- Contract Acceptance Testing (CAT)
- Regulations Acceptance Testing (RAT)
- Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT)
The above-mentioned types of testing evaluate if the following areas (user, business, contact) are working well and match the requirements of the users. For instance, user acceptance testing checks if the product is working well for the users, business acceptance testing determines if the product meets the business prospects and requirements and regulations acceptance testing evaluates if the product meets all the guidance and doesn’t violate any software rules and regulations.
Further, we are going to share the pros and cons of acceptance testing and how it helps in the overall improvement of the product‘s performance.
Pros Of Acceptance Testing
- It reduces the maintenance cost of the product by identifying errors
- Makes it easier for the clients to describe their requirements
- Covers the Black-Box testing approach and thus covers all the functions of the software
- Builds confidence and trust in clients for the product as they become a part of the testing
- The development team doesn’t participate which eliminates any chance of a false outcome/result.
Cons Of Acceptance Testing
- It takes a lot of time to conduct acceptance testing
- Not all users have the knowledge of the product
- Many users avoid participation in the testing
- Opinions of the users vary
- Results take longer to build due to all the variable opinions
Conclusion
Acceptance testing is the last and crucial part of the software development and testing process. It makes sure that the product is tested out for all its features by the real-end users and eliminates any scope for errors in the product. It also builds a level of confidence among the users for the product as they themselves became a part of the testing process.
We hope you understood all the provided information, and in case of any further queries, feel free to reach out to us in the comment section below.
Happy Testing!
