The Fine Art of Definition
Project management has come a long way from the rigid waterfalls of the past. We live in the era of Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and whatever flavor of the month LinkedIn influencers are pushing.
But amidst the colorful sticky notes and stand-up meetings, one critical component often goes missing: Acceptance Criteria.
The Problem with “It Should Work”
Language is messy. When a stakeholder says “I want a user profile,” they might imagine a full social media dashboard. The developer might imagine a database entry with a username field. Both are “right,” and the result is a guaranteed argument two weeks later.
The solution is explicit specificity.
The Acceptance Criteria (AC)
AC is the contract. It is the agreed-upon set of conditions that determines when a ticket is moved from “Doing” to “Done.”
It serves three masters:
- The User: Is this what they actually need?
- The Developer: Do I know exactly what to build?
- The QA Analyst: Do I know exactly how to break it?
How to Write It
Rule-Oriented (The Checklist)
This is simple and effective. A list of true/false statements.
- User can upload an avatar.
- Avatar must be under 2MB.
- Invalid files show a red error toast.
Scenario-Oriented (Gherkin/BDD)
Used for more complex flows, following the Given/When/Then pattern.
Given I am a logged-out user When I attempt to access the dashboard Then I should be redirected to the login page
The Bottom Line
Define your criteria before you write a single line of code. It feels like homework, but it saves you from the “that’s not what I asked for” meeting. And nobody likes that meeting.