Alpha Testing

Definition

Alpha testing is the launch testing consisting of the development organization’s initial internal dry runs of the application’s acceptance tests in the production environment.

Objectives

The typical objectives of alpha testing are to:

• Cause failures that only tend to occur in the production environment.
• Report these failures to the development teams so that the associated defects can be fixed.
• Help determine the extent to which the application is ready for:
  • Beta testing.
  • Acceptance testing.
  • Launch.
• Provide input to the defect trend analysis effort.

Preconditions

Execution of alpha tests can typically begin when the following preconditions hold:

• The application has passed all system tests.
• The delivery phase has begun.
• The independent test team is adequately staffed.
• The production environment is ready.
• The application has been ported to the production environment.

Completion Criteria

Alpha testing is typically complete when the following postconditions hold:

• An initial version of the acceptance test suites exists.
• The customer representative has approved these acceptance test suites.
• The acceptance tests execute on the production environment.
• Acceptance testing does not discover any:
  • Severity one defects.
  • Severity two defects that do not have adequate work arounds.

Tasks

typically involves the following teams performing the following testing tasks:

• Independent Test Team:
  • Test Planning:
    • Determine alpha testing completion criteria.
    • Update the alpha testing subsection of Project Test Plan (PTP).
  • Test Design:
    • Select an adequate subset of the system test suites of test cases (both functional and quality) to be repeated on the production environment during alpha testing.
  • Test Implementation:
    • Fix any defects in the test suites found during the evaluation.
  • Test Execution:
    • Execute the alpha test suites on the production environment.
  • Test Reporting:
    • Report failures that occurred during testing to the development teams so that the associated defects can be fixed.

Environments

Alpha testing is typically performed on the following environments with the following tools:

• Production Environments
  • None

Phases

Alpha testing typically involves the following tasks being performed during the following phases:

Guidelines

• To the extent practical, reuse the tests from system testing when performing alpha testing rather than producing new tests.