Page - 97 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

Measure Twice, Cut Once: Acceptance Testing 97 type of testing as a free acceptance testing. You release the software and the customers do the testing job for you—finding and reporting the bugs. This also shows which functionalitiesare of greatest importance for the end users and where the development efforts should be focused. It sounds great, especially if you lack thebudget toperformacceptance testingandyouhavea tightbudgetonother types of testing. Yes, the end user may do it for you, but are you sure that every bug they encounter will be reported, are you sure that even the reported bug is clearly described? Think about how much resources you will spend trying to identify a bug poorly described. And, after all, who will use your software if it turns out that yourbeta release was a really lousy product?Do not ever forget that in the modern world peopleare communicatingveryeasily and the opinions in the forumsfor the products really decide what products the mass of the users will download and use. Our advice is to be very careful when making a beta release and making sure you didanalpha testing inadvance. 2.4 MainDifferences Between AlphaandBetaTesting To be more precise in distinguishing alpha and beta testing as they are the most commonones,here is acomparative table (Table4). 3 Acceptance Testing,Part 3:Approaches While all other types of testing has the initial intent to reveal errors, acceptance testingisactuallyacrucialstepthatdecidesthefutureofasoftware,anditsoutcome provides quality indication for customers to determine whether to accept or reject thesoftware. Acceptance testing is often considered a validation process, and it does three things: 1. Measureshowcompliant thesystemis withbusiness requirements 2. Exposes business logic problems that unit and system testing have missed out since unit andsystem testingdonot focus thatmuchonbusiness logic 3. Providesameans todeterminehow“done” thesystemis The very basic steps to organize an acceptance testing, where managers shall start, are: 1. Define criteriabywhich thesoftwareshallbe considered“working” 2. Create a setofacceptance testing test cases 3. Run the tests 4. Recordandevaluate