Difference between acceptance test and functional test?

Question

What is the real difference between acceptance tests and functional tests?

What are the highlights or aims of each? Everywhere I read they are ambiguously similar.

Answer 1

The answer is opinion. I worked in a lot of projects and being testmanager and issuemanager and all different roles and the descriptions in various books differ so here is my variation:

functional-testing: take the business requirements and test all of it good and thorougly from a functional viewpoint.

acceptance-testing: the "paying" customer does the testing he likes to do so that he can accept the product delivered. It depends on the customer but usually the tests are not as thorough as the functional-testing especially if it is an in-house project because the stakeholders review and trust the test results done in earlier test phases.

As I said this is my viewpoint and experience. The functional-testing is systematic and the acceptance-testing is rather the business department testing the thing.