What is Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT)

In this post, we will learn about Operational Acceptance Testing in detail.

Critical software bugs or defects can result in commercial failure of any service or product. Bugs in the software product frustrate the end user and make them leave the software without using it in the future. It is important to perform the operational testing throughly and accurately to overcome these problems.

What is Operational Testing?

In STLC, operational testing or operational acceptance testing (OAT) is done to evaluate the operational readiness of a software application before releasing to the production. It ensures the smooth system operation in its standard operating environment (SOE).

Operational Acceptance Testing is also known as Operational Readiness Testing (ORT) or Operations Readiness and Assurance Testing (ORAT).

Its main focus is to mimic the production environment.

Operational testing is a type of non-functional acceptance testing. It is performed during the last stage of STLC (i.e., after user acceptance testing (UAT) phase). It confirms that product, system, service or process meets operational requirements such as performance, security, reliability, accessibility, stability, maintainability, accessibility, interoperability, backup and recovery.

It peforms in a testing environment that is similar to the production environment.

It verifies whether the software operates the way it is intended without disrupting the business process.

What are the types of Operational Acceptance Testing?

The types of operational acceptance testing are

SLA (Service Level Agreement) Monitoring Test
Operational Documentation Review
Code Analysis
Installation Testing
End-to-End Test Environment Operational Testing
Performance Testing
Load Testing
Security Testing
Backup and Restore Testing
Fail over Testing
Recovery Testing

What are advantages of operational testing?

The advantages of operational testing are as follows:

It allows feature interaction
It offers backup and restore facility, disaster recovery, operational support and many more
It checks security vulnerability of the software.
It ensures the optimum user experience by validating various aspects of the software before releasing to the public.

Conclusion:

Operational acceptance testing validates the product quality and ensure better user experience.

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