First of all: A royal road and a really correct solution to automate acceptance tests does not yet exist. I am as aware of that as many of you are aware. But is that really so? Is there no way to go?
What is your solution?
What would be the right approach for planning and implementing the automation of the acceptance test?
You automate acceptance testing by writing Automated Acceptance Tests and using a devops pipeline for continuous integration
These are frequently (not not always) UI tests.
Set up your environment to that when developers change code they run all the automated tests locally.
Set up your Continuous Integration environment ('tests that run on a cloud server') so that when changes are made and pushed, tests are run. This should happen both at branch and master levels.
If one is appraising a solution that requires things like long run-times, massive datasets or 100's of users ie things that would be difficult to replicate, then perhaps testers may assist. You don't want to end up with a complicated black-box though, as that only creates more code to worry about!
The correct answer to this question is 'It Depends'. If your problem can be solved by automation then use it - it has to be evaluated though as there is no magic bullet in testing.
The choice of best acceptance testing practices can vary according to the project, organization and the system under test. I am not sure that the answer that follows would be used as a generic solution but surely does help in software testing domain.
1: Using regression test result as the acceptance criteria:
In most organizations, on integrating new features the functional tests are integrated into the regression test suite and are ran as a single test. This ensures the end to end test coverage of already existing features and the newly incorporated features. As we all know, these tests will obviously cover the user acceptance tests scenarios also.
So one of the best practice is to keep around 95%< pass rate as the acceptance criteria for the release candidate.
2: Using Keyword driven testing
Use frameworks like RobotFramework to create keyword-driven tests. Make product owners, and business analysts to write high-level keyword-driven test cases and hand it over to QA automation team, who then develops the low-level source code for this high-level test-cases.
2: Using Behaviour driven testing
Same approach like in KDD, but here BDD frameworks like cucumber is used. The PO and BA creates the high-level behavior driven test cases using feature files in gherkins (Given, When,Then) format, and QA team have to write the step-definitions.
