To achieve success in product development, your teams must be aligned on clearly defined business criteria. If your teams are not marching to the same drumbeat, you significantly increase your risk exposure around quality issues and threaten your ability to hit deadlines.
So how can companies ensure alignment? One popular option is incorporating business acceptance testing into existing workflows. In this blog, we break down business acceptance testing, why it’s important, and how to leverage it in your product development workflows.
Business acceptance testing is a form of testing that assesses a business requirement of an organization.
Business acceptance testing (sometimes called user acceptance testing) seeks to meet business requirements in a specific business scenario against the business case. It plays a vital role in validating that all the business requirements are fulfilled before releasing the product in the market.
Business acceptance testing is a crucial component of modern product development. It helps organizations determine whether a product is ready for real-world usage and that the new functionality truly dissolve with existing functionalities.
Business acceptance testing flags functional defects, enabling development teams to adjust the discovered issues before the product goes live or promoted to the next phase in the workflow.
When the stakes are high, and a single defect can mean losing years of progress, managing risk and optimizing your testing is key to successful product development. Watch my on-demand webinar, featuring Eran Kinsbruner, DevOps Chief Evangelist at Perforce Software, to learn more.
Before testing can begin, and ideally before development, organizations need to establish their business criteria. This ensures everyone is on the same page regarding the definition of “done”. It’s critical during testing that testing teams and product leaders are measuring success the same way.
Therefore, while business acceptance testing is done as a final check on a product, the process begins with writing those requirements. A good foundation of a requirement should include the definition of done and the testing requirement, which allows the tester to break test cases out of the requirement and flush them out one by one.
If all conditions are met, the feature is ready to go and is aligned with the expectations – whether that’s KPIs, quality standards, compliance regulations, or others.
The primary benefit of business acceptance testing is to mitigate risk. By catching defects during the testing phase, organizations can prevent a flawed product or feature from hitting the market. Depending on the application, these flaws can have profound – even deadly – consequences.
Additional benefits include:
Organizations across dozens of industries utilize business acceptance testing to ensure that their products are free of bugs and defects before deployment. To maximize the benefits of business acceptance testing, development teams should leverage a lifecycle management tool like Helix ALM.
Check out the latest Helix ALM demo to see how it can transform your team’s test management.
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