Best Practices for Handling Acceptance Criteria

January 10th, 2022 by Adam Sandman

We had a customer ask us what was the recommended way to manage the Acceptance Criteria of requirements in a project. There are actually several different ways you can handle acceptance criteria depending on your exact process (and preference):

You can simply add a custom Rich Text Description textbox to the Requirement artifact. That will appear underneath the main description.
You can use a requirement of type Acceptance criteria and make it a 'Has Steps' type so that you could enter the acceptance checklist as steps.
You create a .Feature file in the documents section and link to the requirement. That way you get the automated Gherkin syntax highlighting.
You can use a test case of type Acceptance Criteria and use the test steps.

We discuss each of these options below:

Overview

First, imagine you have the following user story that you want to write acceptance criteria for:

As a writer, I want to receive notifications when others add comments so that I am up-to-date.

In Spira you will represent this as a requirement of type user story:

Now you want to add the acceptance criteria to the user story. Here's some different ways you can write the user story:

Given I don't have app open when my phone is locked then I should receive a banner notification.
Given I have the app open when I am writing on the doc then the bell icon should update to show unread notifications with count.
Given a user was mentioned in a comment using @ mention when the mentioned user is reading the comments then a flash message should show up on the same comment thread with a message notifying about the new comment.

1. Custom Rich Text Property

The simplest option is to just add a custom Rich Text property to the User Story requirement artifact:

That will appear underneath the main description:

2. Requirement Type with Steps

Another option would be to use a separate requirement to store the acceptance criteria. You can use a requirement of type Acceptance Criteria and make it a 'Has Steps' type so that you could enter the acceptance checklist as steps.