Acceptance Testing and Agile Requirements

If you want to review a chapter of a book on agile requirements that deals with acceptance testing then you can find one just here. To give you a taste of the style here is the definition of system acceptance tests:

SATs (System Acceptance Tests) are high-level tests intended to assure the completeness of a user story. User story acceptance tests are written to assure that each increment of software is delivering value, and that the project is progressing in a way that will ultimately satisfy the needs of the business owner. Generally:

• They are written in the language of the business domain (they are business facing tests from quadrant 2).
• They are developed in a conversation between the developers, testers, and product owner.
• While anyone can write tests, the product owner, as businessowner/customer proxy, is the primary owner of the tests.
• They are black box tests in that the y only verify that the outputs of the system meet the conditions of satisfaction without concern for how the result is achieved.
• They are carried out.

And here is a general definition of User Acceptance Testing

Some Acceptance Testing exam questions

There hasn't been a post on acceptance testing in this blog for quite a while. So here are a few acceptance testing related news items.

First up is some trial exam questions for the foundation level of the ISTQB (which incidentally is the same as ISEB foundation level although the two exam boards differ their qualifications in software testing for all higher level certified exams).

2.4 (K1) Which of the following is NOT part of acceptance testing?

a) Integration testing
b) Performance, load and stress testing
c) Requirements-based testing
d) Security testing

2.5 (K1) Who should have the main responsibility for acceptance testing?

a) The operations group
b) The customer
c) The programmers
d) Usage specialists

2.6 (K2) What is the main difference between system testing and acceptance testing?

a) System testing concentrates on functional testing, while acceptance testing concentrates on nonfunctional testing.
b) Acceptance testing is a regression test for the changes implemented during system testing.
c) System testing is done against the developers’ interpretation of the requirements, acceptance testing against customer understanding.
d) System testing is done on the development platform, while acceptance testing is done on the customer platform.

There are more software testing questions for ISTQB foundation exam here

There is also a couple of acceptance testing news items. One is about AT&T Onyx which is going into field testing and then its final technical acceptance test. The story is here. The other is about Vodafone and Verizon and the Storm 2 launch. It seems that Verizon wants additional time to do technical acceptance testing and try to get as many bugs out as possible before launch. Interesting that the acceptance test is being viewed as a quality improvement step rather than "Formal testing conducted to enable a user, customer, or other authorised entity to determine whether to accept a system or component." (More on acceptance testing servuces)

Both the Onyx and Storm stories are from Fudzilla.

Traditional Acceptance Testing and SOA agility/quality

Its good to see articles that challenge the status quo. I saw one at Sys Con which looked at agility and quality and posited a different development triangle to the traditional time-scope-cost triangle.
To set the scene it looks at an apparent conflict between quality and agility in development.

"Organizations don't have to sacrifice quality to obtain agility. They must rethink what they mean by quality in the SOA context. As ZapThink has discussed before when we explained the meta-requirement of agility and the SOA agility model, the agility requirement for SOA vastly complicates the quality challenge, because functional and performance testing aren't sufficient to ensure conformance of the SOA implementation with the business's agility requirement.

To support this agility requirement, therefore, traditional pre-deployment acceptance testing is impractical, as the acceptance testing process itself impedes the very agility the business requires. Instead, quality becomes an ongoing process, involving continual vigilance and attention. Quality itself, however, need not suffer, as long as the business understands the implications of implementing an agile architecture like SOA."

Worth reading.

Acceptance testing a super computer

Imagine a new supercomputer that is fifteen times as fast as its predecessor. Imagine it was dedicated to looking at environmentally friendly issues such as storing hydrogen or climate change. How much do you think it should cost.

Well since this super computer exists you don't have to imagine this. The answer is $21.4M. It can run over 160 trillion calculations a second. That's 86,400,000,000,000,000.00 calculations every day. Fast enough to get it into the list of the fifty fastest computers in the world.

Its a bespoke HP computer and its undergoing acceptance testing by researches at the EMSL. Now that is one acceptance test I'd like to be on. I wonder how you get to be a researcher who tests at EMSL.

Automated software testing and QA solutions

Original Software, provider of automated software testing and quality assurance solutions, has received praise for its capabilities in enabling agile development in a recent report by independent industry analyst group Ovum. In the report, written by Ovum analyst Paul Herzlich, the company’s solutions were applauded for being a better fit for agile processes than any competitive functional test automation suite.

For the full story go here.

SDLC test management tool

The recession is definitely slowing up the rate that companies are buying new software tools. But I noticed this software testing tool story on SDLC test management tools:

An independent software testing company has identified a strong demand for Software Planner in the UK despite the current economic recession. Software Planner is an award winning application lifecycle management (ALM) tool that helps organisations manage all components of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This includes managing project deliverables, requirements, defects, test cases, test execution and help desk support. It also provides collaborative tools and interactive reporting dashboards to support change programmes spread across teams, locations and organisations.

SAP User Acceptance Testing

To test SAP effectively requires the involvement of the end users of the systems, Without this, testing the synthesis of the organisations business processes and the SAP business modules (such as FI, HR, MM and PP) can become either overburdened with documentation or unrepresentative of how the SAP system will really be used.

Yet these users have two handicaps: they are very rarely trained testers and they often have a business as usual job to run while they do the testing as well. These mean they have little time to spare for testing and what time they have is not spent as effectively as they would like. A double whammy that often limits the value of acceptance testing SAP implementations.

This course on SAP acceptance testing is designed to address that very problem. It is also suitable for many of the other participants in SAP UAT such as business analysts, SAP implementors and managers of acceptance test.

The culture of acceptance

This is an extract from an article in Newswireless about changing the culture of acceptance for IT project failure.

All businesses would wish to implement strategic IT projects more quickly, economically and surely. Above all, they need to eliminate the risk either of failure or of the project taking so long that the business needs no longer match the aims of the project. There are two important trends which will help: Agile methodology and ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS).

The Agile approach to IT implementation offers companies a quicker and surer means of delivery. Agile delivers business benefits earlier and unlike Prince2 or Waterfall, allows feedback from the end users without having to wait for user acceptance testing.

Prioritised requirements can be bundled into short “Sprints” of work during which analysis, design/build and software testing are executed in rapid succession. In this way Agile provides a platform for projects to be tested frequently against business aims and for new system functionality to be demonstrated to end users along the way. This enables the business and IT provider to work closely together, with stakeholders involved throughout the project.

New testing tool that aids acceptance testing

This is an extract from an article about a new free software testing tool. The full article can be found at Welt Online:

"Actional Diagnostics can detect issues early in the software development lifecycle such as policy compliance; in addition, software developers can use the product to quickly understand whether a service fits their needs before any code is written. Once services are identified for use, developers can inspect, invoke, test, and create simulations for prototyping and problem solving.

Actional Diagnostics is currently in beta testing with customers and will soon be available as a free download. Developers wishing to be sent an alert when the software download is available can register at: http://www.progress.com/web/global/alert-actional-diagnostics/index.ssp.

Actional Diagnostics helps application developers, client developers and consumers meet the demands of aggressive development schedules by providing code-free problem resolution, deep visibility into service behavior and performance, quality and compliance validation. Existing Mindreef customers will continue to benefit from SOAPscope features including early service simulation, design-time policy validation, and unit, functional, regression, and acceptance test. "

Data acceptance testing and GIS

This is from an item on GIS User

Laurel Hill GIS has announced the release of GeoData Sentry 3.0. GeoData Sentry is an off-the-shelf automated QA/QC software product for ArcGIS geodatabases. GeoData Sentry 3.0 features a rich set of attribute, spatial and logical connectivity tests. GeoData Sentry's easy to use configuration interface allows for rapid test development and automatic test generation. GeoData Sentry's error reports are designed for ease of use with coordinated HTML files including summary metrics and details of individual errors.

"As GIS becomes mainstream within the enterprise, and organizations serve their data on the web, GIS data quality becomes critical. Advanced analytical uses require high quality GIS data. GeoData Sentry provides a platform for rapidly assessing the overall quality of the geodatabase, whether used for data acceptance testing, data migration testing or on-going data assessment and audits. This version 3.0 release allows for more geodatabase connection options, giving a wide range of geodatabase users the ability to quickly, easily and cost effectively assess the quality of their data." states Matt McCain, Vice President of Laurel Hill GIS.