STLC - Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance criteria means the expected behavior of a functionality, module and application as listed in the requirement documents. It is verification stages/checkpoints to determine whether or not the software system has met the requirement specifications. The main purpose of this test is to evaluate the system's compliance with the business requirements and verify if it has met the required criteria.

Acceptance Criteria is a set of statements, that mentions clearly about the expected pass/fail result. Acceptance criteria specifies both functional and non-functional requirements. These requirements represent “conditions of satisfaction or expected behaviour.” There is no partial acceptance; either a criterion is met or it is not met.

These criteria defines the boundaries and parameters of a functionality/module and determines whether functionality/module is completed and is working as expected.

High Level Acceptance criteria is mentioned at the Test Plan Level. The acceptance criteria is converted to a list of points to be verified or expected results at the test cases level.

Acceptance criteria is defined on the basis of the following attributes −

• Functional Correctness and Completeness
• Data Integrity
• Data Conversion
• Usability
• Performance
• Timeliness
• Confidentiality and Availability
• Install and Upgrade ability
• Scalability
• Documentation