Acceptance criteria — an important information in the user story for product development
I think working in a collaborative environment and continuously excel into to it is defining the attitude of the team. This emphasis on working on the one single goal across all team members. In this story, we will discuss about Acceptance criteria in detail and how it helps the product teams to achieve their sprint goals. Before you read further, you should first go through Check-list of a quality User Story to get the clear context of user story and its different elements.
Remember one important point, product’s are build by the team of actual human beings not by the resources. So it is essential for team members to come on consent for specific topic during product development. As we discussed in Check-list of a quality User Story, the building block of any product is an unique and independent user story. And to come to conclusion on that story, the team members needs a reference to take a call (completed or not) about the user story.
So to take a call, Acceptance criteria plays an important role of the user story. It will help to communicate better to all team members of the scrum team during scrum ceremonies and beyond. The developer will have a clear picture about about the boundary of the story and its expected output. The quality assurance (QA) member will get specific idea about writing respective test cases.
There are multiple ways to write Acceptance criteria. Here I am sharing with you the most used:
Example 1 — behavior based approach
Given: The user has entered correct username and password in the login screen
When: The user clicks on the ‘submit’ button in the login screen
Then: The user should be able to redirected to the home screen
In above example, given defines the said situation, when defines the specific action required to proceed, when defines the output of the user story.
Example 2 — specific point based approach
User can enter the required username and password in the login screen
User should be able to see the home screen after login
In above example, the points are specific and it says the expected output straightaway.
Now depending on the team’s consent, team members can follow a specific practice. Always keep one thing in mind that at the end the output is important and it should create the actual business value for the product.
Conclusion
AGILE methodology is all about the continuous and active team spirit. Team spirit comes only when all team members are working for the common goal. For each and every user story, the acceptance criteria defines the common goal and team is bound to achieve that goal. This information will empower all team members to communicate and align for that user story.
