Functional Specifications vs Acceptance Criteria
Developers should learn and use functional specifications to clarify project requirements, reduce ambiguity, and prevent scope creep during development meets developers should learn and use acceptance criteria to reduce ambiguity in requirements, prevent scope creep, and ensure that development efforts align with stakeholder expectations. Here's our take.
Functional Specifications
Developers should learn and use functional specifications to clarify project requirements, reduce ambiguity, and prevent scope creep during development
Functional Specifications
Nice PickDevelopers should learn and use functional specifications to clarify project requirements, reduce ambiguity, and prevent scope creep during development
Pros
- +They are essential in waterfall methodologies and formal project management contexts, such as government contracts or large enterprise systems, where clear documentation is required for compliance and communication
- +Related to: requirements-analysis, software-documentation
Cons
- -Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case
Acceptance Criteria
Developers should learn and use Acceptance Criteria to reduce ambiguity in requirements, prevent scope creep, and ensure that development efforts align with stakeholder expectations
Pros
- +They are essential in agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban for defining 'done' criteria, facilitating effective sprint planning, and enabling automated testing through tools like Cucumber or SpecFlow
- +Related to: user-stories, behavior-driven-development
Cons
- -Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case
The Verdict
Use Functional Specifications if: You want they are essential in waterfall methodologies and formal project management contexts, such as government contracts or large enterprise systems, where clear documentation is required for compliance and communication and can live with specific tradeoffs depend on your use case.
Use Acceptance Criteria if: You prioritize they are essential in agile methodologies like scrum or kanban for defining 'done' criteria, facilitating effective sprint planning, and enabling automated testing through tools like cucumber or specflow over what Functional Specifications offers.
Developers should learn and use functional specifications to clarify project requirements, reduce ambiguity, and prevent scope creep during development
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