Acceptance Criteria: Eliminate Ambiguity

One of the problems that people have when trying to build real, meaningful acceptance criteria for their work is that the criteria end up being ambiguous. There are several reasons why this might be and I won't get into them, in this post.

Any such force can be at least partially counteracted by introducing one of two simple rules.

1. Any way to interpret an AC as met means it is met.
2. Any way to interpret an AC as unmet, it is unmet.

You might think these rules are horribly unfair and one-sided. Yet, that's why they work so well. They eliminate the potential for ambiguity by automatically selecting the most relaxed or strictest version of any AC.

At the same time, they provide an incentive to drive ambiguity out of an acceptance criterion's wording. The easiest way to ensure nobody uses the "wrong" version of an acceptance criterion is to make sure there is only one interpretation.

Over time, the criteria will justify themselves and no incentive will be required to make them unambiguous, but something like this can help at first.