For each Build this work is focused on the following:

• Making as assessment of the stability and testability of the Build
• Gaining an initial understanding-or confirming the expectation-of the development work delivered in the Build
• Making a decision to accept the Build as suitable for use-guided by the evaluation mission-in further testing, or to conduct further testing against a previous Build.

This work is also referred to as a smoke test, build verification test, build regression test, sanity check or acceptance into testing. This work helps to prevent the test resources from being wasted on a futile and fruitless testing effort.

The work is primarily centered around the Tester and Test Analyst roles. The most important skills required for this work include providing timely results, thoroughness and applying reasonable judgment to assessing the usefulness of the Build for further testing.

It is appropriate to allocate a subset of the test team to perform this work; the other team members ignore the new build until it is validated as stable, devoting their efforts instead to either additional tests against the build from the previous test cycle, or improving test assets as appropriate.  See: Activity: Improve Test Assets.

As a heuristic for relative resource allocation by phase, typical percentages of test resource use for this activity are: Inception - 00%, Elaboration - 05%, Construction - 10% and Transition - 10%. Notice that it is typical for there to be no formal Build in the Inception phase.

The sophistication and availability of test automation tools and the necessary prerequisite skills to use them will have an impact on the resourcing of this work. Where automation tools are used, much of this work can be performed fast and efficiently: without automation significantly more effort is required.