What is an acceptance criteria?
An acceptance criteria is a condition that the software must satisfy to be accepted by a user, customer or an integration.
It’s being used to define the functionality of a task (normally a user story) to clarify the expected end-result of both functional and non-functional requirements. This should be included in the Definition of Done.
When do we define it?
We might be tempted to define this after the development has started. This is a trap, avoid it! The outcome will be that you confirms the functionality that’s already being built rather than taking the customer’s or user’s needs and requirements into consideration.
By defining the acceptance criteria prior to the development we’re sure to take the root cause into consideration and why it’s needed.
How to get started?
It’s important to take WHAT into consideration. Not HOW. To write great acceptance criteria we are to cover the exact needs of the user, not how the developers are to implement it.
This is for example a good acceptance criteria:
The user can approve or reject an invoice.
This example isn’t very good since it’s too technical:
The user can click a checkbox to approve an invoice.
Examples
User Story: As a student I want to see my semester fee so that I know my remaining balance*.
The acceptance criteria for this story may be:
- The semester fee is displayed
- The semester fee is calculated
- The total balance of all the semesters are displayed
- No semester fee is displayed if an invalid login is given.
User Story: As a user I want to log in to the application so that I can start using the [service].
As for some acceptance criteria they could be something like this:
- After a successful login the user should be navigated to the homepage with a welcome message (functional requirement).
- A welcome message should be displayed to the upper right corner on the homepage (non-functional requirement).
- The homepage should be loaded within 1 second (performance requirement).
*An article of writing a user story will be written later.
