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.

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.

In software testing the ISTQB defines acceptance as: formal testing with respect to user needs, requirements, and business processes conducted to determine whether a system satisfies the acceptance criteria and to enable the user, customers or other authorized entity to determine whether or not to accept the system. Acceptance testing is also known as user acceptance testing (UAT), end-user testing, operational acceptance testing (OAT) or field (acceptance) testing.

A smoke test may be used as an acceptance test prior to introducing a build of software to the main testing process.

Testing is a set of activities conducted to facilitate discovery and/or evaluation of properties of one or more items under test. Each individual test, known as a test case, exercises a set of predefined test activities, developed to drive the execution of the test item to meet test objectives; including correct implementation, error identification, quality verification and other valued detail. The test environment is usually designed to be identical, or as close as possible, to the anticipated production environment. It includes all facilities, hardware, software, firmware, procedures and/or documentation intended for or used to perform the testing of software.

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