Acceptance Testing: Elicit and Validate Requirements for Success

Exposure to agile concepts is helpful but not required. Awareness of good requirements practices and analysis models is desirable but not required.

Build skills in identifying and specifying acceptance tests while eliciting requirements. The results are not just verified, but also validated requirements. Acceptance tests as requirements examples act as specifications and streamline delivery cycles.

In this interactive workshop you learn to specify ATs in tandem with eliciting and analyzing user requirements. Learn how this approach yields higher quality requirements, seeds the test effort, and actively engages your business partners. You learn how to identify business context and elaborate business scenarios as the basis for prioritizing requirements and using those prioritized scenarios to specify user acceptance tests. Learn powerful techniques that help you achieve efficiencies in your analysis and aid in delivering the business value your customers need.

Prior experience with use cases or user stories is highly recommended.

This course is endorsed by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) and aligns with the IIBA's Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK®) applicable tasks and techniques. You'll earn 8 PDs (Professional Development hours) for initial certification or 8 CDUs (Continuing Development Units) by attending this course.

• Understand how acceptance tests are used to elicit and validate requirements
• Explain how tests are derived via the business context and scenarios
• Write acceptance tests using data tables and the Given/When/Then construct
• Specify testable quality attributes using Planguage
• Describe the linkage between acceptance tests and other analysis models including data models, business rules, and use cases or user stories

The participant's manual includes slides with illustrations, practice exercises and templates.

 1. What are Acceptance Tests

• The "V" model
• What, Who, Why, of acceptance tests (ATs)
• Value of acceptance tests
• When to identify ATs
• Learning Game: exploring requirements
• Collapsing the "V"
• Examples - Requirements - Tests

2. Requirements Perspectives

• 7 Dimensions and Functional Requirements
• Exploring features and stories
• Case study using functional dimensions
• Right sized story
• Scenarios

3. Acceptance Tests for Functional Requirements

• Data tables
• Given/When/Then
• Exploring functional requirements with models
• Tracing ATs to requirements
• The "steel thread"
• Dependency graph
• Prioritization

4. Acceptance Tests for Nonfunctional Requirements

• External interfaces
• Quality attributes
• Pragmatic Planguage
• Design and implementation constraints

5. Wrap Up

• Testing perspectives
• Challenges with ATs
• Validate with reviews
• Adapting AT for software packages (COTS)  
• References and AT Tools