Acceptance criteria
Acceptance criteria are the conditions a story must satisfy to be considered complete — testable, bounded statements describing what the system does. Good AC are behavioural (user-visible outcome), not implementation-specific (database schemas).
AC and the Definition of Done are siblings: AC are story-specific, DoD is team-wide. AC come in two common formats: bullet list ('System returns 200 when payload is valid; system returns 400 with field-level errors when payload is invalid') and Gherkin scenarios. Both work; pick one per team and stick to it. The point isn't the format, it's eliminating ambiguity at planning time so 'done' has the same meaning to PM and engineering.
Long-form posts that explore acceptance criteria in depth — when to use it, common failure modes, how AI helps.
- How AI writes acceptance criteria (and where it fails)The honest map of where AI is dramatically better than humans at writing acceptance criteria — and the five places it confidently writes garbage. Plus the prompts that work.10 min read
- Replacing Jira: a 30-day playbookThe honest 30-day playbook for moving off Jira. Four phases — audit, parallel run, cutover, decommission — plus the three patterns where this doesn't work.11 min read
- The connected delivery graph: one source of truth from PRD to prodMost teams ship software with five tools that don't talk to each other. The friction isn't any individual tool — it's the missing graph between them. This is the case for one connected graph.9 min read
- Are AI-generated test cases worth shipping?Yes, with a sharp caveat — when they're tied to AC and reviewed by a human. Five categories where AI test generation is great, five anti-patterns to catch.9 min read
- Can AI write Gherkin? (yes — here's how)Yes. AI writes Gherkin well, often better than humans for surface area coverage. Five wins, five recognisable failure modes, and the prompts that work.8 min read
- What's the best AI tool for sprint planning?Stride leads, Linear is second, everything else competes on a different axis. The litmus test: drop a PRD in and see what comes back in 90 seconds.6 min read
Related terms
- Definition of Done
Definition of Done (DoD) is a team-wide checklist that every story must satisfy before being marked complete — typical entries include: code reviewed, tests passing, documentation updated, deployed to staging, AC verified.
- Gherkin
Gherkin is a structured plain-English DSL for writing executable acceptance tests, using the Given / When / Then format.
- Story splitting
Story splitting is the practice of breaking a large user story into smaller stories that each independently deliver value.