Best Practice for Acceptance Criteria

Who writes the Acceptance Criteria?

While your business analysts may draft the Business Acceptance Criteria, the QA team should write the Implementation Acceptance Criteria for the building block they will be testing.

This has a few benefits:

1. It gets the QA team involved early in understanding the process.

2. It plays back the understanding of the requirements by the QA team, and eliminates misunderstandings early.

3. QA team often thinks of breaking conditions not covered by the Business Analysts. This helps them identify them early.

4. The ACs relate directly to test cases, and so this is work the QA team would be doing anyway, but brought forward in the lifecycle to reap the benefits above.

Isn’t that marking your own homework?

This argument sometimes comes up, but it is not the case.

The QA team is simply drafting the IACs. The IACs are then reviewed by the business analysts, architects, etc. before being marked as approved.

AC Format

Prefer the Given / When / Then format over free-text.

Some people may push back as it is more work, but that is the reason for doing it this way, as thinking in this manner helps draw out nuances that can be missed in free-text.

Most business users can understand Given / When / Then format after some coaching, but to mitigate that, the BAs can also draft a free-text summary for the Business ACs.