Supporting Acceptance Testing in Distributed Software Projects with Integrated Feedback Systems: Experiences and Requirements

During acceptance testing customers assess whether a system meets their expectations and often identify issues that should be improved. These findings have to be communicated to the developers -- a task we observed to be error prone, especially in distributed teams. Here, it is normally not possible to have developer representatives from every site attend the test. Developers who were not present might misunderstand insufficiently documented findings. This hinders fixing the issues and endangers customer satisfaction. Integrated feedback systems promise to mitigate this problem. They allow to easily capture findings and their context. Correctly applied, this technique could improve feedback, while reducing customer effort. This paper collects our experiences from comparing acceptance testing with and without feedback systems in a distributed project. Our results indicate that this technique can improve acceptance testing -- if certain requirements are met. We identify key requirements feedback systems should meet to support acceptance testing.