Acceptance Criteria - Explained
What is Acceptance Criteria?
Written by J. Mance Gordon
Updated at April 21st, 2024
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What is Acceptance Criteria?
Acceptance criteria is a set of pre-established requirements or standards that a project or product must meet. It comprises of sentences structured to encourage a definite accepted or rejected response which establish both practical and non-practical requirements.
How to Establish Acceptance Criteria
Acceptance criteria define what needs to happen to finish an Agile user story. A user story describes the goal a user should be able to accomplish when using a company's website, software, or application. Often stories get written in this format:
As an [subscriber] I want [action] so that [goal].
For example: As a Netflix subscriber, I want to be able to save titles of interesting movies so that I can remember to watch them later.
Following the Agile process, which is a specific approach to project management used in software development, the development team goes over different user stories in a meeting. The acceptance criteria define how far a user story can go and upon satisfying the requirements, the acceptance criteria confirm when a story finishes and is functioning as desired. The acceptance criteria for the above example might include:
- There is an option on the screen that allows the user to select the desired movie to save.
- Only selected movies will get stored for review later.
- The user has a section in the profile to view saved movies.
- A movie deletes from the list once viewed.
Acceptance criteria are written in simple language, in the same manner the user is written. The development teams shows they've satisfied each of the requirements when presenting the functionality to the product owner, who for the purpose of development, represents the actual user when the product is finished and made available. By using acceptance criteria as an integral part of user stories, developers get to see how a feature or function will work from the perspective of the user. Also, uncertainty is removed from requirements because with the criteria the feature or function gets tests to confirm its complete and working.