Can you clarify the differences between the Satisfaction Conditions (COS) and the acceptance criteria?

Question

My understanding so far: (please correct me if I am wrong)

• Ideally, COSs are set at an early stage by the product owner in Sprint planning, which makes conversation easier. They can be considered an abstract definition, which will become the basis of acceptance criteria for the history of the user or function.
• Approval criteria are developed by the Group and confirmed by the owner of the product (with conversations ensuring mutual commitment). They are developed at any time as part of the Sprint cycle. They can be used to guide and adjust focus for automatic testing.
• To summarize, we could say: COS ---> Acceptance Criteria ---> A set of acceptance tests.

Although this sounds from a theoretical point of view, it seems to me that I need more details (ideally, in a written example) in order to better understand this concept.

Answer 1

I personally refer to how Mike Cohn defined CoS in Agile Estimating and Planning. Here is an excerpt from an online chapter (for example):

Satisfaction Terms

Each project is initiated using a set of goals. Your current project may be to create the best word processor in the world. Creating the world's best word processor, however, will usually be just one goal for this project. There will almost certainly be additional goals regarding schedule, budget and quality. These objectives may be considered customer or the conditions of the product owners satisfaction - that is, the criteria that will be used to assess the success of the project.

When I returned when I was in high school and was charged with writing an article about a book such as Moby Dick, I always asked the teacher how long the document should have been. The barn replied something like "Five Pages," and then I knew its basic condition for satisfaction. There were, of course, a number of additional, unwritten conditions for satisfaction, for example, that the paper would be well written, my own work, in English, and so on.

At the beginning of release planning, the team and the product owner jointly explore the conditions of the product owners' satisfaction. These include ordinary items - scope, schedule, budget, and quality, although flexible teams usually prefer to handle quality as they shouldn't. The team and product owner are looking for ways to satisfy all conditions of satisfaction. the owner of the product, for example, may be equally satisfied with the release of five months, including one set of user history, as with the release a month later, including the additional user of the history.

Sometimes, however, all product owners' satisfaction conditions cannot be met. The team may have the best word processor in the world, but they cannot build it by next month. When there is no acceptable solution, the conditions of satisfaction should change. Because of this, let go of the planning and conditions of product owners satisfaction is very iterative, as shown in Figure 3.2.

Satisfaction conditions both for release planning and for iterations http://www.informit.com/content/images/ch03_9780131479418/elementLinks/03fig02.jpg

_{Figure 3.2. The conditions are satisfied by both output and iteration planning.}

Once the release plan is approximately the next three to six months, it is used as an input to the planning of the first iteration. Just as release planning began by examining the conditions of product owners satisfaction, that is, iteration planning. To iterate over the conditions of product owners, satisfaction, as a rule, functions shed as developed following and some high-level tests for each feature.

As an example, consider a travel site that includes the user’s story "As a user, I want to be able to cancel the reservation." When discussing this story with the product owner, developers find out what its conditions. Satisfying this story includes

• A user who cancels more than twenty-four hours receives a full refund.
• A user who cancels less than twenty-four hours in advance has returned everything except the $ 25 fee.
• The cancellation code is displayed on the site and sent to the user by e-mail.

Like release planning, iteration planning is iterative. The product owner and team discuss the various ways to best suit the satisfaction of the iteration.

The feedback loops are shown in Figure 3.2 from the received new product to grow back into the boxes of conditions to satisfy the beginning of both the release and the planning of iterations. Based on the experience of product development incrementing during an iteration, the team may have gained knowledge or experience that affects planning at one or more of these levels. Similarly, showing a product is an increase in existing or potential users can generate new knowledge that cause changes in plans. An agile team will incorporate these changes into their plans to the extent that they result in a higher value product.

To summarize, this is how I see and use the terms:

• CoS captures the expectations of the PO, and they exist at different levels (release, iteration, history).
• At the story level, I see CoS as part of the extra data recorded through the Conversation .
• Acceptance criteria are how the software confirms that the story was realized before it was satisfied ( Confirmation ). They are a more formal definition of CoS.

All this is very close to your understanding (although I ideally prefer that PO provide acceptance criteria rather than confirming those developed by the team).

Resources

• Agile approach to assessment and planning by Mike Cohn
• Writing Contracts for Agile Development by Mike Cohn
• C2 Wiki Acceptance Test
• Essential XP: Card, Conversation, Confirmation from Ron Jeffries.

Answer 2

I think in SCRUM these terms mean the same thing:

• Acceptance criteria (most common for user stories).
• Definition of Completed
• Satisfaction conditions (I think this comes from traditional project management such as ITIL).

When we determine user stories, we always collect acceptance criteria from the product owner. User history does not exist if you do not accept the acceptance criteria. The development team never defines them. Responsibility for determining acceptance criteria lies with the software. The selection criteria for custom stories selected for the sprint should not change during the sprint. The reason is that the team started these user stories based on an assessment that was made for the initial eligibility criteria. The user's history is only executed if he passes the test of eligibility criteria during the sprint.

Conclusion: For me, eligibility criteria are the conditions of satisfaction and the boundaries of the user's history (and conversation).

Example. As a customer, I need to pay by credit card so that I can make purchases on the Internet. Eligibility Criteria:

• Visa and MasterCard are accepted.

At this we stated that it is necessary to support Visa and MasterCard, but, for example, AMEX does not.

Answer 3

@Ladislav Actually, although I’m not sure that there is a big difference between the acceptance criteria and CoS, the definition of what is done is something else. These are checks that every story must go through to be considered complete; they are technical criteria, while eligibility criteria and CoS seem to be different variants of eligibility criteria for a business.

Example:

• Acceptance criteria: Visa and MasterCard are accepted.
• Definition of Done: All stories must pass QA without critical errors.

Answer 4

Recognition criteria relate to history. These are basically business rules that a story must go through to be considered fulfilled.

Satisfaction conditions are another term for AC.

The confusion comes from the fact that someone, a well-known trainer, trainer and practitioner, began to call AC the second term CoS.

Everything except AC must have a specific name other than AC.

One of the basic principles of flexibility is transparency. This means using a common language, a common understanding, to help us describe and achieve our goals. This question and related confusion is a good living example of why transparency is so important in dexterity.

It is no coincidence that my first sentence was "mainly" in it. This is because some common things in all user stories are not listed in each user story. DoD is an example of a community that is left outside the AC because it is known to be a "common understanding" by everyone.

The accepted answer simply adds more confusion to this question.

I hope this helps.