Acceptance Criteria and Acceptance Tests: What’s the Difference

Recently, someone asked for help on a WhatsApp community about creating acceptance criteria and acceptance tests, and in the interaction that ensued, I realized many people do not get the latter as easily as they do the former.

Defining Acceptance Criteria

When it comes to defining user stories, acceptance criteria refers to the criteria by which we accept that the goal of a user story has been achieved. It consists of several requirements that a product or deliverable must meet to be considered satisfactory and accepted by the stakeholders, or end users.

Acceptance Criteria are typically created in the early stages of a project, often in collaboration with stakeholders, and are used as a reference to determine if the product meets the desired outcomes. They are usually documented in user stories, specifications, or other project artifacts by the project or product manager, depending on the company structure.

Acceptance criteria are written in a way that’s easy for the development team to understand, and it’s also helpful to get the customer’s input when writing the acceptance criteria. This can be made easy by following the SMART framework (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). For example, acceptance criteria for a school portal during an upgrade might be: The portal must be able to handle up to 10,000 concurrent user requests without crashing.

Defining Acceptance Test

Acceptance tests, on the other hand, are a process of verifying that the feature or product meets the set acceptance criteria. It is carried out to ensure the system’s compliance with user expectations and business and functional requirements. Sometimes, acceptance tests can also include security requirements and legal requirements. For example, fintech products are subject to several legal and security regulations because of the sensitive data they use and process.

It is also important to add that acceptance tests vary depending on the use and purpose they are to serve, as seen below.

• User Acceptance Tests
• Business Acceptance testing
• Contract Acceptance Testing
• Regulations Acceptance testing
• Operational Acceptance Testing
• Alpha and Beta Testing

Source: Browser Stack

Depending on the type of acceptance test you plan to use, it can be carried out by a representative of the customer, QA, the compliance team, the engineering department, or a member of the team that understands the purpose of these tests.

A well-carried acceptance test ensures the following;

• That the software meets all of the set criteria
• Helps ensure that the software meets the customer’s needs
• Helps identify and fix defects early in the development stage
• They help improve the quality of the software.

In summary, acceptance criteria are a set of predefined conditions that must be satisfied before a feature, product, or update can be considered acceptable by your users, while an acceptance test is a process of evaluating or testing the criteria against the product to ensure it meets the required standard.