Sometimes it’s clear when you’ve reached the end of the road. Sometimes it’s not. It’s also possible to go too far. The same is true for Jira issues. If the scope of a piece of work isn’t well-defined, or if the product owner’s expectations aren’t clear, developers might mark an issue as complete only to have it rejected by the product manager. Acceptance criteria comprise a list of requirements, specific to the story, that must be met for a issue can be considered complete.
How Does Acceptance Criteria in Jira Work?
Using Acceptance Criteria on your Jira issues removes ambiguity about the expectations and prompts the developers to think about the feature from the user’s point of view. Acceptance Criteria also signal up front what level of testing will need to be done before the feature can be released. While your initial Jira Acceptance Criteria will most likely focus on ensuring that the feature delivers the expected behavior (example: The user can update the field…), criteria can also refer to the overall user experience such as ensuring consistent and attractive UI, and undiminished performance.
Acceptance Criteria vs Definition of Done
Note that while both lists should be complete before marking an issue as done, Jira acceptance criteria is different from Definition of Done. While your Definition of Done is likely to be consistent across issues of the same type – lending itself to creating a default Checklist template, or a global checklist that is automatically added to issues of that type when they’re created:
Acceptance Criteria are specific to the individual user stories, so they need to be created separately on each issue.
Jira Acceptance Criteria Example
Creating a Jira Acceptance Criteria Checklist
Since Acceptance Criteria items need to be items that clearly pass or fail, a checklist is a perfect way to track them. Having them present on the Jira issue from the onset, means that the dev team can see the product owners expectations.
An issue may need multiple checklists on its journey from user story to fully developed feature. In fact, previous posts have discussed how you can use a checklist to create a Definition of Ready for stories in your backlog, and a Definition of Done for issues in your sprints. Checklist for Jira | Pro allows you to use multiple checklists while also using a default checklist template, and adding templates via Jira automation. This means you can create an automatically-added Acceptance Criteria and Definition of Done templates for all stories in your project, while also allowing developers to add their own checklists to track the specific task needed in order to implementing the feature.
You can create Jira Acceptance Criteria lists simply by clicking in the Checklist UI and typing your list items. However, if you want to ensure that Acceptance Criteria are added to all of your Jira stories, consider creating a checklist template.
Jira Acceptance Criteria Templates
Since Acceptance Criteria are unique to each story, your Acceptance Criteria template should serve as a prompt, guiding the Product Owner as they define the specific function of each story.
To create a Checklist Template:
- Install Checklist for Jira | Pro.
- Navigate to Checklists in the left nav bar.
- Click Create template.
- Name the template, list your criteria and click Save.
- Once your list is created, you can set it as a default for the appropriate issue types.
That way everyone knows when they’ve reached the end of the road.
