Page - 94 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

94 M.Mitev aware of the problems that will be met and relying on the testing performedso far, manydecide to skip the need forconductingacceptance testing usingbothexternal and internal resources. And what happens next—great loss for the company as the end user is dissatisfied with the software and refuses to use it. The company will face not only profit loss, but what is more important in the modern world: loss of reputation and credibility among partners, competitors and above all—“his/her majesty”—theenduser,whoisnowtojudgeevenharshlyasever,becauseofall the possibilitieshe/shehasand theease of switching fromonesoftware to another. That is the reason each project manager must be aware of the main challenges oforganizingandconductingacceptance testing.Thebenefits fromit arenumerous and will only lead you and your team to a greater success. Of course, it should be performed correctly and planned really well; otherwise you will have to deal with the losses that followthe releaseofa lousyproduct in theeyesof the enduser. Imagine, you find a severe bug in the acceptance testing phase—what are you supposed todo? It is awell-knowntruth thatbugsareeasy tobefixedatanearlystage—notonly thebugdoesnotaffecttheintegratedsystem,butthetimeandresources;bothhuman resourcesand financial resourcesare a lot less compared to fixing a bug later on in the development of the project. Imagine, you find a severe bug in the acceptance testing phase. What are you supposed to do? Ignore it and continue to delivery or try tofix it,but theeffect that itwillhaveonthesystemmaypostponethereleaseof thesoftware formonths.Andwhynotskip theacceptancetestingphase?Because it is the end user who will judge if yourproduct is goodor not and will determine its success. Table 1 shows the status of the IT projects in the last 5 years—CHAOS Report 2015. Following thenotably famousreports, accordingto the CHAOS Report in 2015, the main reason for bugs are bad requirements—they are not clearly specified, they are incomplete and they are not taken into account seriously. This affects the development of the software, the software test cases created and in the end the conceptionof theproject.Thus, thephaseofacceptingtestingwhereboth theclient and the end users are included is the best way to check if all the expectations are met. It isbetter topostponethe releaseof thesoftware than releasea lousyproduct. Doing that, in the acceptance phase, you will be able to collect data both from the client(onemoretime,actually)andfromtheenduserandmakeeverybodyinvolved in the project satisfied. Everyone knows how the business works—only one bad referencecanruin itall,despitehavingthousandsofsuccessfulprojectsbehindyou. Table 1 Statusof IT projects according to CHAOS Report 2015 2011 (%) 2012 (%) 2013 (%) 2014 (%) 2015 (%) Successful 29 27 31 28 29 Challenged 49 56 50 55 52 Failed 22 17 19 17 19