Significance of Acceptance Criteria in Software Testing
Defining the acceptance criteria is about setting some predefined requirements fulfilling which is necessary for marking the completion of a user story. Often known as the “definition of done”, the Acceptance Criteria help identify the scope and the necessities of development work that ought to be executed for finishing off the user story.
The product backlog has stories for which you ought to set the acceptance criteria while being a responsible product owner or manager. However, you can only do so after considering each condition of the requirements document that causes variance in defining acceptance criteria.
Significance of acceptance criteria for delivering projects
Acceptance Criteria comprise all conditions that application software must fulfill for being acceptable to the audience. These conditions are set uniquely and are based on individual user stories. From the perspective of the end user, setting the AC is crucial as it helps define the behavior of each feature of the application.
You may have encountered unexpected outcomes at the end of a development stage. You can avoid such a situation while using well-written acceptance criteria. It helps fulfill the expectations of the users as well as stakeholders at large.
One of the key aspects of acceptance criteria is that you have to set them before a certain user story is addressed by the developers. Otherwise, the chances of deliverables meeting user expectations and desired outcomes become feebler.
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Defining Acceptance Criteria
Simply put, the acceptance criteria consist of a detailed list of conditions that the features of the software are designed to fulfill.
It meets the following conditions:
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Main Purposes of Setting Acceptance Criteria?
Your goal has to be set at a much higher level if you are longing to clarify the needs of the stakeholder.
Let’s segregate the needs to gain a clearer view of the purposes of setting Acceptance Criteria:
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Stating the detailed scope of the application feature.?User stories have boundaries that you set with the AC. The QA Team can understand if the story is working as desired or completed by studying the functionality details mentioned in user stories.
Exploring negative scenarios.??Your AC can help the system detect passwords that are deemed unsafe and can restrict a user from entering. Password formats that are not accepted as valid constitute the instance of a negative scenario depicting an unexpected user behavior or entry of invalid values. The scenarios and the reaction of the system are defined in the Acceptance Criteria.
Bridging the gap.?Acceptance criteria align the client’s visions with that of the QA team. It helps ensure that the members of the QA team share a common viewpoint with that of the stakeholder. The client and stakeholder must realize what they can expect from an application’s feature while the development team states their expectations on how that feature should behave.?
Streamlining UAT.??The user acceptance tests are based on user stories. The fail or pass scenarios should be clearly understood as every acceptance criterion gets tested independently. Performing automated tests should help in verifying the story based on the acceptance criterion.
Performing feature analysis.?The goals of the development team get specified by the acceptance criteria. Creating tasks out of the user stories gets easier if the requirements of the team are precise; it helps them achieve a correct estimation of such tasks.
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Types of Acceptance Criteria?
Several formats are followed for setting the acceptance criteria depending on the complexities of the requirements and the initial task.
The formats are:
The second and third formats have some unique structures although they are the most frequently used ones. However, based on your project requirements, you have to check out the other formats.
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