Acceptance Criteria. How to improve our user stories.

In the last post we talk about the user stories, so now we need to speak about what is the acceptance criteria. Well, acceptance criteria is a technique for improve our abilities for write requirements for any project. It will help us to make better user stories. It consist on describe step by step actions that complete the user stories, this help us for make more testable and more precise ours functions about the user story.

Like everything, we also are gone to used a structure for the acceptance criteria - remember, the acceptance criteria is related with the user story so you never forget this- and follow the next sentences, the acceptance criteria is describe like scenarios:

• Scenario  An scenario presented, always related with a user story
• Given        a context for the user story
• And           more context for the same user story
• When        the moment which the action is execute
• Then      the result of the action following the contexts of the user story
• And           others result for the same action

For be clear, we are have to check an example, lets use the past user stories. For our acceptance criteria let's use our sign up user story; it say this:

• As a sign up user.
• I want to fill the form of my personal data correctly.
• So that confirm me as a regular and new user, so I can access the features of the page.

On this story we want to sign up a new user in an application, so if we used our acceptance criteria, it will be look like this:

• Scenario: In action to become in a new user for the application, fill the form for the personal data.
• Given a page with a form to be filled with check-boxes and text camps
• And buttons for cancel or sign up for
• And complete all the camps for the register
• When click on the button of sign up
• Then I can see my profile page with all my data
• And can access for search other users

We need to have present that with can use more than one acceptance criteria for a user story. In other cases with can add more "And" tags for represent better the acceptance criteria, and can add more scenarios for the story. On the next post we're gone to talk about making a kind of whiteboard for keep in order our stories.

References

For made this topic I used as reference the post of 10 Tips for Writing Good User Stories and the article What's in a Story?. I hope they don't demand me.