QA Acceptance

Write acceptance criteria that a reviewer can run against the running app and decide pass or fail without asking the author. The criteria are the contract — automated tests cover correctness, QA covers feature-level behavior.

When to use

• A feature change is heading to QA and needs a written validation plan.
• A reviewer is asked to verify a PR that touches user-visible behavior.
• An incident postmortem requires a regression check before reopen-prevention.
• A release candidate needs a pre-cut smoke pass.

When not to use

• The change is unit-test-only (utility refactor, internal naming). Acceptance criteria are unnecessary churn.
• You are asked to write tests against API contracts. Use contract testing, not feature QA.

Acceptance criteria format

Each criterion is a single, independently-verifiable statement: