Acceptance Criteria

When your QA team tests your product before release, you want it to satisfy the requirements that your product manager has specified. But as I have mentioned before, while requirements should always be testable in principle, it is not always practical to test them directly before release. When a requirement is not directly testable before release, what should your QA do to ensure the product satisfies it?

Your product manager, designers, and QA team should collaborate to agree on acceptance criteria. In many cases, acceptance criteria for a product are exactly the same as the requirements. But when it's not possible to test a requirement directly, you can define separate acceptance criteria that indirectly give you confidence that the requirement is met.

One example I have given of a requirement that may not be practical to directly test before release is:

Take, for example, the requirements for a new, super-reliable model of car. We might specify that the car should last seven years without repairs as long as the owner maintains the car according to a certain maintenance schedule and doesn't have a collision. But it is not possible to directly test whether the product meets these requirements without producing the car and driving it for seven years.

What corresponding acceptance criterion could you use to test this requirement before release?

The question becomes: "What can I test about the car before release so that I can be confident that the car would last seven years?" Designers and testers will be most qualified to answer this question, but one possibility is to set up a simulation that accelerates the wear and tear on the car. If the car lasts one week in the simulation, then we might be able to extrapolate that it would last seven years under real-life conditions.

Comments

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions . Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions. They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problems she faces or the ...

Cauvin

Search This Blog