Acceptance criteria

What are acceptance criteria?

Acceptance criteria are a list of expectations that a user will have, when using a feature. They are written in short sentences to define a specific behavior of a feature, and they are commonly added to user stories to add more description.

Do you have any examples?

Examples could be, the widget should have a text box and character count. Entering characters to reduce the character count could be another example. Or the third one is when character count is at zero, no more characters can be added to the text box.

What's the value?

It gives the team a boundary on what they should and shouldn't be delivering in a feature, and acceptance criteria, can help with discussion and collaboration of features. And acceptance criteria can help testers generate test ideas and identify risks.

Are there any pitfalls?

Acceptance criteria can help stem testing ideas, but they are not tests themselves. And vague acceptance criteria can potentially lead to misunderstandings, and bugs in the system too.
Acceptance criteria are a list of points on a work item (often a documented as a ticket in a work tracking tool) that must be completed in order for:
  1. The work item to be considered "done" in the workflow
  2. Stakeholders (e.g., product owner, customer, end users) to accept the work as complete

It can be helpful to write acceptance criteria in a "given, when, then" format.  For example:
Given I'm not logged into the system,
When I navigate to the My Profile page,
Then I will be prompted to log in

Acceptance criteria can be used to generate testing ideas, and they can also be tested themselves.  Does the described behaviour make sense in context?  Is this really necessary in order to solve the problem?  Is the implementation method really crucial to the acceptance of this work item?

One of the best ways to write acceptance criteria is during a collaborative, story shaping meeting, such as Three Hats / Three Amigos or a refinement session, where people from different disciplines are present.  This will help the team to raise questions and concerns as early as possible.
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