Acceptance criteria are also sometimes called the “definition of done” because they determine the scope and requirements that must be … It seems to me that the post and the discussion is missing a couple of points. But acceptance criteria is just business level requirements needed to define that the story is complete when all those needs are met. No more detail really. Most often this will be discussed prior to the Development phase and the team will know more or less what it has to develop and how it has to be developed. The Agile Practice Guide itself, on the other hand, recommends Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) through which “the entire team gets together and discusses the acceptance criteria for a work product”. It serves as a checklist that is used to check each Product BacklogItem (aka PBI) or User Story for completeness. A few tips on writing acceptance criteria whether you’re in software or marketing: Tip #1: Talk about it. If the how needs to be changed then it can be done in another iteration. This leads to merely verifying that the functionality built works rather than verifying that the functionality meets user needs and expectations. When writing acceptance criteria in this format, it provides a consistent structure. Provide the criteria to be met before the bug or user story can be closed. Express criteria clearly, in simple language the customer would use, without ambiguity regarding the expected outcome. Elaborating from Vision to Story ! You want to learn more about Acceptance Criteria? Epics, Features & User Stories ! You stated “Acceptance criteria constitute our “Definition of Done.” Not sure if this is a typo or really what you meant. Probably the most important requirement is that it correctly calculates tax due given incomes and outgoings of various sorts. my thought would be “no” and to back that up I would say that if the vision of the user story is absolutely clear and my team is high performing and understands the product owners request very clearly than acceptance criteria can be left out. The Given/When/Then format is helpful way to specify criteria: Given some precondition When I do some action Then I expect some result. Regardless of which method is implemented, the user should still be able to achieve their goal of approving or rejecting an invoice. The definition of Done is structured as a list of items, each one used to validate a Story or PBI, which exists to ensure that the Development Team agree about the quality of work they’re attempting to produce. This sets our testers up for success, since they will be taking our criteria and translating them into automated test cases to run as part of our continuous integration build. I also think acceptance criteria can be written to early. Particularly when dealing with system level user stories. (e.g., “User can approve or reject an invoice” rather than “User can click a checkbox to approve an invoice”). In an ideal world, I would be able to provide guidance to design that says “user needs to be able to SELECT from a list of options”, and that may or may not translate to a dropdown. Acceptance criteria constitute our “Definition of Done”, and by done I mean well done. While Acceptance Criteria is a commonly understood concept in software development, Definition of “Done” is … Really acceptance criteria must be created before the beginning of development. It plainly describes conditions under which the user requirements are desired thus getting rid of any uncertainty of the client’s expectations and misunderstandings. In practice, design, engineering, and test almost always demand a lot more detail. I’m sure our readers will find them helpful. I have been referred to this post as providing “the agile view of acceptance criteria” by a colleague whose team is (mis)using acceptance criteria to provide another level of detail of requirements. My understanding of Agile is that it focuses mainly on User Value and Business Value and thus User Stories and Features will define the What only. Acceptance criteria are generally more specific than requirements, but they are not another level of detail. That is the point of a story in the first place. In order for the story or feature to be accepted it needs to pass theses criteria; otherwise, it fails. One of the more frequently asked questions in my Scrum workshops is around the difference between Definition of “Done” and Acceptance Criteria, and how they relate to User Stories.. I offer specific suggestions in crafting acceptance criteria that can improve any agile process. Design Thinking takes a Customer-Centricapproach to create desirable and sustainable products. 4. The criteria should be independent of the implementation, and discuss WHAT to expect, and not HOW to implement the functionality. The requirement might be “as a finance officer I want to be able to accept an invoice”, the acceptance criteria might be “when I perform the accept action, the invoice is accepted (check by examining the record for the invoice)”. Additionally, it helps testers determine when to begin and end testing for that specific work item. 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