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Acceptance Criteria

The conditions a story must meet to be done.

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Also known as: AC, acceptance criteria for user stories, story acceptance criteria, done criteria for a story

Acceptance criteria are the specific conditions a single piece of work (usually a user story) must meet to be accepted as done. They turn “reset password” into something you can build and verify without guessing.

Story: As a user who forgot my password, I want to reset it by email, so that I can get back into my account.

Acceptance criteria:

  • Given I enter a registered email, when I submit the form, then I receive a reset link within 1 minute.
  • The link works once and expires after 1 hour.
  • Given I enter an unregistered email, I see the same confirmation message (no account discovery).
  • The new password must meet the password rules, and I see why when it doesn’t.
  • After a successful reset, all my existing sessions are logged out.

What good criteria look like

  • Specific and testable. Someone can say yes or no for each one. “Fast” and “easy to use” aren’t criteria, and “the page responds within 500 ms at p95” is.
  • About behavior (what), not implementation (how). “Link expires after 1 hour”, not “use a Redis TTL”.
  • Include the unhappy paths: errors, empty states, permissions and edge cases (given-when-then is a common format).
  • Agreed before work starts, by the people who build it, test it and ask for it.
  • Short enough to fit a story. Fifteen pages of criteria mean the story is too big.

Why they matter

They give a shared definition of “this story is finished”, prevent “that’s not what I meant” at the end, guide what to test (acceptance tests, BDD), and help estimate.

Don’t confuse with the definition of done

Acceptance criteria differ for each story. The definition of done is a team-wide checklist that applies to every story (code reviewed, tests pass, documentation updated, deployed). A story is done when it meets both.

When criteria are unclear, ask before coding. It’s much cheaper than rewriting.