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Back in January (has it been that long!) I completed the Foundations of Humane Technology course from the Center of Humane Technology . You may have heard of them, they made the Netflix Documentary " The Social Dilemma ". If you haven't watched the movie, it's well worth a watch, delving into the often devastating impacts of Social Media. The course explored how to build technology in a more responsible way to minimise the harmful consequences of the technology you build. It's perfect for technology oriented Product owners and developers like myself, requiring us to think about externalities and unintended consequences, and aligning our values with the products we build. I was made to reflect on how technology has impacted me personally, and realised how my health, cognition and attention were impacted by technology overuse. I was obliged to acknowledge that I am very privileged and lucky, I don’t have any major accessibility issues and my demographic allows me t

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