Why acceptance criteria for every story is important to deliver project successfully?

What is acceptance criteria?

Acceptance criteria are documented requirements for every story and product owner

validate every completed story against these criteria. Team consider these criteria as checkpoints while developing software and story is considered done when team meets all criteria. Lack of clarity on acceptance criteria can leads to poor quality and delay in development.

Acceptance criteria must includes functional and as well as non-functional requirement. Functional requirements include exact business processes, user types, boundary limit and validations. Non-functional requirements includes authentication, authorization, speed, security and performance.  

Who will decide and write all acceptance criteria?

Ideally customer (product owner) should write acceptance criteria because product owner know about requirement. But does product owner also understand about non-functional requirement? If yes, can team deliver all non-functional requirements? Considering all this, its better that product owner writes functional acceptance criteria  and further refines them during backlog grooming and sprint planning where team collaborates as well.

What is format for acceptance criteria?

There is no such format for writing acceptance criteria but if team is planning to follow Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD) then Given, When and Then is very popular format.

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