One way to help you and your team write better acceptance criteria is to make them the sole authority on the scope of any new work. If there's no acceptance criterion for something, it isn't required. If it isn't required, it shouldn't be done.
For this to work, all ancillary documentation must carry exactly zero weight. The title of a story can't be "a little" meaningful. The description can't enforceable under "special circumstances". They are comments. They mean nothing.
Putting this rule in place has some side benefits I'll delve into later. Right now, I'd like to focus on the fact that this provides an incentive to figure out how to write good acceptance criteria.
If you can only specify a requirement with an acceptance criterion, you'll have to figure out how to make sure each one actually specifies a requirement.
