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]