Acceptance testing is formal testing conducted to determine whether or not a system satisfies its acceptance criteria, and to enable the customer, user or authorized entity to determine whether or not to accept the system.

Acceptance testing is often conducted at the development site, and then at the customer site using the target environment.

How the customer evaluates the deliverables to determine whether they meet predefined set of acceptance criteria is described in the Product Acceptance Plan. The Product Acceptance Plan describes the roles, responsibilities, required resources, tasks, test cases and acceptance criteria required to determine the acceptability of the product.

Another useful input to determining the project's readiness for formal test are the Configuration Audit Findings that report on whether the developed software conforms to its requirements and whether the required work products are physically present.

Deficiencies in the Configuration Audit Findings could result in the Acceptance Test being postponed. The Deployment Manager should review minor deficiencies with the customer, for whose benefit the formal tests are conducted, to determine whether testing should proceed.

The System Administrator needs to ensure that the infrastructure (hardware and software resources), and support software is ready for the upcoming test tasks.

Once the Deployment Manager is satisfied with respect to readiness of all items that need to be tested, he follows the agreed upon test schedule outlined in the Product Acceptance Plan. Testing begins when all participants required for witnessing and running the test are present.

The Tester loads all the software and test data files, and proceeds with the testing using the collection of  test cases, test procedures, test scripts, and expected test results in the test model. Test results are recorded together with any discrepancies between the expected and actual results.

Test results should be reviewed at the end of each day at a Test Results Review Meeting. At this meeting, results for each test case need to be reviewed and noted as being "acceptable" or "not acceptable". The minutes of the meeting need to record any significant discussions and decisions.

In case of the test results that are considered to be "unacceptable", the Deployment Manager can raise Change Requests for the anomalies and submit them as part of Change Control mechanism for review by the Change Control Board.