Glossary

Acceptance Criteria

By ArcPM

Acceptance criteria are the specific, testable conditions a requirement or user story must meet to be considered done — turning "we built it" into "we built the right thing, verifiably."

Good acceptance criteria are unambiguous and testable: anyone can check whether they are met. They remove the gap between what a PM meant and what an engineer built.

They also bound scope: everything in the criteria is required; everything outside is not — which makes trade-offs explicit and prevents silent scope creep.

Example

For "reset password": a reset link is emailed within 30 seconds, expires after 1 hour, and can only be used once.

How ArcPM applies it

ArcPM carries acceptance criteria through to prototypes and PRDs, keeping every requirement testable and traceable as the product evolves.

See ArcPM