Business-Driven Acceptance Testing Methodology and Its Practice for E-Government Software Systems

To deliver a business information system, it is necessary to not only verify the system, but also validate the system in order to assure the system can provide the business value which the users expect. However, conventional acceptance testing only confirms that the system meets the requirements specifications. Therefore, it is difficult to detect lack of user requirements. This article proposes business-driven acceptance testing methodology in order to validate the system by confirming the system meets the users' business requirements. We explain the testing process, test case selection technique, test scenario design method, and discuss the experiences in the application of the proposed method to a large-scale human resource management system shared by multiple ministries and agencies of Japanese government.