Creating User Stories for Testers Part 2

Acceptance criteria are conditions that the software must meet in order to satisfy and be accepted by the users, customers, and other stakeholders. Each criterion could be functional, non-functional, or performance, and could simply be recorded in a checklist or bullet-ed format.

For example, the following could be acceptance criteria for US-002:

• There should be a message after the registration field if user has not yet entered any detail. (Functional)
• The “Submit” button should be disabled while there are still errors. (Functional)
• Error messages should be in red font. (Non-functional)
• Form fields, success/error messages, buttons, and links should comply with the Site Design Standards. (Non-functional)
• The entire page should load in 10 seconds or less. (Performance)

Alternatively, user stories can also have their acceptance criteria in a “Given-When-Then format”, as used in Behaviour-Driven Development:

Given <scenario/precondition>, when <action to be performed>, then <expected result>.

Using one of the checklist items above, we can write an acceptance criteria in the “Given-When-Then” format as follows:

• Given that I am a new user, when I enter a unique username, then I should see a success message “This username is available.” beside the username field.
• Given that I am a new user, when I enter an existing username, then I should see an error message “This username is already taken.” beside the username field.

It’s important to note that acceptance criteria only help in ensuring that developers, testers, and everyone else involved are on the same page in delivering user stories. These do not substitute the tests being written by testers; rather, they partially serve as a basis for the tests.

Conclusion

Creating user stories should involve the product owner, Scrum team (consisting of analysts, testers, developers, etc.), and most importantly, users. Different perspectives and experiences are needed in order to come up with INVEST-able user stories. Testers have the mindset that can help the team understand the user’s needs and determine the test-ability of user stories.

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