Artifact: Product Acceptance Plan
 Product Acceptance Plan |
The Product Acceptance Plan describes how the customer will evaluate the deliverable artifacts from a project to determine if they meet a predefined set of acceptance criteria. It details these acceptance criteria, and identifies the product acceptance tasks (including identification of the test cases that need to be developed) that will be carried out, assigned responsibilities and resources required. In a smaller scale project, this plan may be embedded within the Software Development Plan |
| Worker: | Project Manager |
| Template: | |
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| Input to Activities: | Output from Activities: |
Purpose 
The purpose of the Product Acceptance Plan is to ensure that an objective and clearly defined procedure and set of criteria will be used to determine whether the artifacts to be delivered to the customer are acceptable.
Brief
Outline
(hyperlinks into HTML template in a new window)
1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose
1.2 Scope
1.3 Definitions, Acronyms and Abbreviations
1.4 References
1.5 Overview
2. Responsibilities
3. Product Acceptance Tasks
3.1 Product Acceptance Criteria
3.2 Physical Configuration Audit
3.3 Functional Configuration Audit
3.4 Schedule
4. Resource Requirements
4.1 Hardware Requirements
4.2 Software Requirements
4.3 Documentation requirements
4.4 Personnel Requirements
4.5 Test Data Requirements
4.6 Other Requirements
5. Problem Resolution and Corrective Action
6. Product Acceptance Environment
7. Identification of Required Artifact Evaluations
8. Tools, Techniques and Methodologies
Timing
Developed during inception. Scheduled updates occur based on the results of each Iteration/Phase Acceptance Review.
Responsibility
The Worker: Project Manager is responsible for maintaining the Product Acceptance Plan.
Tailoring
The contract may be explicit about how product is to be accepted in which case there may be no need for a separate plan. In projects that do not have a specific customer, the product may be deemed acceptable when it has achieved a certain maturity (mean time between failure, say). In this case there is no acceptance separate from test and usage, so you can dispense with this plan.
