Artifact: 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, and assigned responsibilities and required resources. On a smaller scale project, this plan may be embedded within the Software Development Plan.
Other Relationships:	Part Of Software Development Plan
Role:	Project Manager
Optionality/Occurrence:	Inception phase.
Templates and Reports:	Template: Product Acceptance Plan
Examples:
UML Representation:	Not applicable.
More Information:

Purpose Timing Responsibility Tailoring

Input to Activities:  Compile Software Development Plan Define Bill of Materials Develop Deployment Plan Manage Acceptance Test Project Acceptance Review Review Change Request

Output from Activities:  Develop Product Acceptance Plan

Purpose

The purpose of the Product Acceptance Plan is to ensure that an objective and clearly-defined procedure, and a set of criteria will be used to determine whether the artifacts to be delivered to the customer are acceptable.

Timing

This artifact is developed during the Inception phase. Scheduled updates occur based on the results of each Iteration or Phase Acceptance Review.

Responsibility

The Project Manager is responsible for maintaining the Product Acceptance Plan.

Tailoring

The contract may be explicit about how the 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 (meantime between failure, for example). In that case, there is no acceptance separate from test and usage, so you can dispense with this plan.

Rational Unified Process