Briefle words · Product & specs
Acceptance criteria
The specific, checkable conditions a particular feature, story or change must meet before the person who asked for it accepts it.
Say it to an AI
Write the ticket with testable acceptance criteria in Given/When/Then: one happy-path example with real amounts, the expired-code error with its exact message, case sensitivity, and the one-code-per-order rule. No adjectives that can't fail.
How an expert would brief the stronger version of “Feature ticket”.
See it
Try it as a puzzle →An online shoe store's product lead writes the ticket a developer (or an AI coding tool) will build promo codes from.
Why: A's criteria name exact amounts, messages and rules; B's 'fast and user-friendly' can't be passed or failed.
More ways experts use it
Write acceptance criteria for the appointment-reminder story as Given/When/Then scenarios: one for sending the reminder one hour before, in the patient's time zone, and one for the patient confirming. Every Then must be observable: channel, content, and what the doctor sees.
Appointment reminder criteria · Product & specsWrite our team's definition of done as a short checklist that applies to every story: acceptance criteria demoed to the PM, code review, green automated tests, staging deploy, accessibility check, docs updated. Make it binary: any unchecked item keeps the story out of Done.
Team definition of done · Product & specs
Related words
Room 1 · Essentials
Learn “Acceptance criteria” in a five-minute lesson