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As discussed in my last article , Writing good Acceptance Criteria gives the Agile team clarity and helps them work towards a common goal, saving time and effort while increasing quality. Now I'd like to dig into the details of how to write good Acceptance Criteria. Behaviour Driven vs Procedural Driven Mindsets Many of us may be used to writing/seeing procedural driven tests; step by step instructions with actions and expected results. Procedure-driven tests are often imperative and trace a path through the system that covers multiple behaviors. As a result, they may be unnecessarily long, which can delay failure investigation, increase maintenance costs, and create confusion. Acceptance criteria, and indeed Behaviour Driven tests, should instead be behaviour driven. This means they should be Declarative , specifying how a system should behave in a particular scenario. Procedural/Imperative: Given the user opens a web browser And the user navigate

Acceptance Criteria can be seen as a chore, a convoluted, verbose set of prose with the sole purpose of satisfying "the business". At best, its value is underestimated and it is often written as a vague list of requirements. Given the right attention, Acceptance Criteria can be extremely valuable to all members of a Scrum team. Before it can be done correctly, we have to understand its value. So what exactly is the point of Acceptance Criteria? Purpose of Acceptance Criteria To define boundaries Acceptance criteria help development teams define the boundaries of a user story. In other words, acceptance criteria help you confirm when the application functions as desired. To reach consensus Having acceptance criteria synchronises the development team with the client. The team knows exactly what conditions should be met, just as the client knows exactly what to expect from the developed functionality. To allow for accurate planning and es

Acceptance tests can be used to verify end to end functionality in a way that is understandable to the business. They are very broad compared with unit tests, and when automated via a tool like Specflow, are based on a more natural language. It's important that we use this natural language to keep tests simple and concise, rather than trying to write long-winded "functional" tests. Good Gherkin Before writing Acceptance tests, learn about Acceptance Criteria Best Practices . The ability to write good Acceptance Criteria translates directly to Acceptance testing. They both follow the same standards and they can be written in the same way. We should attempt to apply these best practices apply to Acceptance tests as much as is practically possible, especially when it comes to grammar as this helps us stick to a standard. The most important thing is to remember that Acceptance tests should be written with the Given, When, Then syntax where: Given sets up a state, When is an a