What are Acceptance Criteria?
In order to be fair to both the business and the customer, acceptance criteria address “what,” rather than “how.” This means the customer can specify what they need a software to do, but give the developers more control of how it is done. Stakeholders express that they need to accomplish a certain task. Given that information, the Scrum team can make it work in the best way. Something that is both simple, and works well with the remainder of the product, but satisfies what the stakeholders need it to do.
Software often has an ambiguous mark of when it is finished. With good acceptance criteria, there is no ambiguity. Either the acceptance criteria are met and the software is done, or it isn’t. There is no partial completion with acceptance criteria. This gives a granular measure of completion, and the Scrum team can see exactly what has been finished.
Acceptance criteria yield a number of benefits for software development. Customers and businesses agree on acceptance criteria up front, so there is no argument later about what isn’t included. As acceptance criteria are met, they can be checked off a list. This gives a clear indicator of what tasks remain. If a task’s acceptance criteria aren’t met, it still has some work to be done.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: