To me, recipe books without photos are a waste. I like to see what I’m making, and know what it should come out looking like. For real, why in the world does anyone make a recipe book with no photos?

Acceptance criteria is like the photos in a recipe book; it gives you the picture of what something should do, look like, etc. Without it you may have an idea of what you’re cooking, or what you’re testing, but you don’t have the full, clear picture, which helps you do a better job.

I’ve worked on new features without having acceptance criteria before, and I’m sure you can guess what happened. Testing took forever as there was so much back and forth with the devs, with neither of us fully understanding how it should work. Then, having to grab UX and the PM and try to figure out if what was built was right, or if all of that time had been wasted as the new feature was already built. From there we have to decide if it’s ok to go ahead with something that isn’t quite right and doesn’t fully function as it should, or if we delay the release. Either option is a crappy one.

Acceptance criteria is how you know what a feature/product needs to do, and how you know if it’s working correctly. Where do you get acceptance criteria? Honestly, it depends on where you work, but ideally it should be a joint effort between developers, QA, and Product. You should all be involved from the beginning of a feature, and during that process talk about how it should work, and update the ticket accordingly.

So, what does acceptance criteria look like? For example, with our simple Facebook login test the acceptance criteria could be:

• Able to successfully login and taken to users Facebook when logged in
• Field Validation (only valid email addresses and passwords accepted)
• Login failure results in error
• Design documents that show what the UI should like, any error message wording, etc

With this information you know for sure what has to work, how it should work, and can then begin testing. Your tests will go further than just the specifics of the acceptance criteria as you do Feature Testing, Integration Testing, and, Regression Testing, and Smoke Testing before a feature is released to production.