Acceptance Criteria Design
Overview
Use this skill to translate approved requirements into acceptance criteria that engineering and QA can execute without interpretation drift.
Scope Boundaries
- Use this skill when the task matches the trigger condition described in
description. - Do not use this skill when the primary task falls outside this skill's domain.
Inputs To Gather
- Approved requirements (
REQ-*) and relevant non-functional requirements (NFR-*). - Business intent, out-of-scope boundaries, and policy constraints.
- User-visible behaviors, system side effects, and error paths.
- Test environment capabilities and observability limits.
Deliverables
- Acceptance criteria set with binary pass/fail expectations.
- Scenario matrix covering happy path, boundary, negative, and failure cases.
- Traceability map: requirement -> criterion -> verification method.
- Open ambiguity list that blocks objective verification.
Quality Standard
- Each criterion is independently testable and yields one clear result.
- Each criterion states preconditions, action, expected observable outcome, and evidence source.
- Boundary values, invalid inputs, authorization errors, and integration failure behavior are covered when applicable.
- Criteria describe required behavior, not implementation detail.
- Overlap and contradiction across criteria are removed.
Workflow
- Normalize requirement intent and explicit assumptions.
- Split requirements into observable behavior units.
- Draft pass/fail criteria for normal, boundary, negative, and failure scenarios.
- Define evidence sources (API response, UI state, logs, metrics, events) for each criterion.
- Run ambiguity and overlap review; publish unresolved blockers.
Failure Conditions
- Stop when requirement intent is unstable or contradictory.
- Stop when a criterion cannot be verified with available test/observability capabilities.
- Escalate when missing instrumentation prevents objective pass/fail judgment.