Acceptance Testing concerns the end-users of the system and the stakeholders. To gain their crucial acceptance, the system should:

• Fulfil its intended purpose and meet the business needs of the system end-users;
• Provide accurate and consistent results with defined combinations of data and under specified conditions;
• Be adequately documented and easy to use; and
• Be reliable and stable, and not adversely impact other systems.

There must always be clearly defined criteria on which to base acceptance of a system. For both system recipients and suppliers, the Acceptance Criteria provide a clear objective for successful completion of Acceptance Testing. Generally, these criteria will be itemised in the supplier contract, although where a contract does not exist (for example, if development is being done “in-house”) Criteria should be detailed in the Acceptance Test Plan.

Over and above the business requirements, Acceptance Criteria may specify:

• System performance and capacity;
• System useability;
• Data integrity and audit trails;
• System security and access;
• System recovery; and
• System reliability.