acceptance-criteria-writer

Overview

Based on Mastering the Requirements Process by Suzanne & James Robertson - the Fit Criteria concept, where every requirement gets a quantified, measurable condition that proves it has been satisfied. Also draws on User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn for the 3 C's (Card, Conversation, Confirmation) where Confirmation = acceptance criteria, and Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn where the Success Guarantee (postcondition) is the use case's acceptance criterion. The key insight from Robertson: if you cannot write a fit criterion for a requirement, the requirement is too vague to implement.

Workflow

Step 1: Identify the requirement or story to test

Start from a documented requirement (FR-XXX), user story, or use case. Extract:

• What the system should do (the behavior)
• Why it matters (the rationale - drives which edge cases to cover)
• Who is the actor (drives the perspective of the criteria)

Step 2: Write the primary acceptance criterion (happy path)

Use Robertson's Fit Criterion format for precision:

FIT CRITERION: [Measurable condition that proves the requirement is met]
MEASUREMENT: [How to verify - manual test, automated check, metric threshold]