Acceptance Criteria, Business Value and Complexity Point in Scrum-

Acceptance Criteria:

Acceptance Criteria are the conditions or stories that a software system product or service must satisfy to be accepted by user, customer or stakeholders. Acceptance Criteria are nothing but ‘work done’ condition or stories accepted by user or stakeholder with the considering there (when and how) changes and needs before implementation begins. It also helps testers determine when to begin and end testing for the user story work.

We work on a team that struggled with getting things ‘done?’ Not just ‘pretty much done’, but ‘really done.’ The kind of ‘done’ where the work matches the expectations, the code has been tested, bugs have been fixed. Most important assets of a high-performing team is a good shared understanding of what it means for a feature or user story to be ‘done.’

Business Value:

Business value means calculate the product backlog. Scrum Team very frequently delivers ‘value’. The product owner- who is part of the Scrum team – is responsible for maximizing the (business) value that a Development team delivers during the sprints.

A team should deliver value and that the Product owner is the key person to decide what has value and what does not; decides the answer of questions which are following below;

• How do you know if work done by the development team results in value?
• What does ‘Maximizing value’ mean in terms of behaviour and decisions?
• How do you know which functionality has more business value over other functionality?

 Different Kinds of Business Values ;

1. Commercial Value-Commercial value is the most obvious one, and consists of functionality or work that translates into profit directly;

• A new piece of functionality that can be paid for, like modules in on-demand web-apps
• Changes that reduce operating costs, like reduction in required servers by improving code o cheaper distribution to customers
• Being able to send a bill to a customer for the work that was done

The key question to ask is ‘How much revenue or profit does this work result in?

2. Market Value-Market value increases the potential number of customers, like;

• Functionality that draws in a new group of customers
• Porting applications to other platforms, like smart phones, from iOS to Android etc.
• Adding features that the competitors doesn’t have or implement them better

The key question to ask is ‘How many new customers will be able to serve?

3. 3.Efficiency Value-Efficiency value increases organizational efficiency and thereby decreases operating costs, like;

• Reduce the amount of errors in a task or increase speed(by automating it or parts of it)
• Reducing the amount of time needed to set up new customer environments or deploy them
• Decreasing the time to market

The key question to ask is ‘How much time or money will this save us?’

4. Customer Value-Customer value increases the  likelihood that customers will continue to use your product like;

• Improving usability in an application to make it easier to use and reduce frustration
• Adding a new feature that is commonly requested by users

The key question to ask here is ‘to what extent will this decrease the likelihood that a customer leaves?

5. Future Value-Future value increases the chances of more easily achieving one of the above values in the future by investing in innovation and learning now, like;

• Investing in new customer framework that can be used for future development
• Reducing technical debt in code to make future changes in the code easier or less error prone

The key question to ask here is ‘How much will this save us in time or money in the future?’

Complexity Point:   Used to measure the effort required to implement a story. They use this before the sprint starts to indicate and figure out how big or small a given feature is or how hard the story is. Hard could be related to complexity, Unknowns and efforts.

For example; If A list the following fruits and ask B to line them up left to right based on complexity of eating the fruits and enjoying them how would you line them up.

Banana, Apple, Pear, Mango, Grapes, Pineapple

B probably put grapes as the simplest as you tried to line up the fruits from simple to complex. Why Grapes? May be because it’s small, easy to wash, quick to eat etc.