Introducing: AI Acceptance Criteria

​​Ever find yourself in a situation where you’re certain you’ve hit the bullseye with your latest release, only to discover that it doesn’t quite fit the customer’s needs? It’s a common hiccup that many product and development teams experience and it could be a real head-scratcher. You might be wondering–where did the wires cross? In many cases, the culprit is ill-defined Acceptance Criteria (AC).

In the world of agile software development, “Acceptance Criteria” are the must-have conditions for a “user story” to be considered complete. Think of a “user story” as a particular problem or need that a feature is designed to address. Thus, the “Acceptance Criteria” define when the solution to that problem is solved.

At the very least, ill-defined AC slows teams down as they continue to interrupt one another to figure out what to build. So, if it’s so critical, why are teams not fleshing it out? Well, manually generating AC is tedious, and since it’s not *actual* coding, it may be confused with “busywork.” 

This is why we’re thrilled to roll out the AI Acceptance Criteria feature in Zenhub…

So, what is “AI Acceptance Criteria” in Zenhub?

In Zenhub, “AI Acceptance Criteria” is a generative AI feature that enables you to auto-generate acceptance criteria in a Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) format for Zenhub Issues and Epics, and GitHub Issues. AI leverages the title of the issues and a subset of the issue’s description to provide relevant Acceptance Criteria suggestions. 

How to start using Zenhub’s AI Acceptance Criteria

As always, this new feature is super easy to integrate into your everyday project planning practices. To try it out, first, make sure that your organization has opted into Zenhub AI. Admins of your organization will be able to opt in from the “Settings” tab. 

If you’ve already opted in, start by making an Issue in Zenhub (either a Zenhub Issue or a GitHub Issue) and writing a title. Then, begin writing a description for it. Once you start writing a description, the option to “Generate Acceptance Criteria” should appear below the description text box. For the most accurate results, it’s recommended that you provide a description that’s a minimum of 400 characters. 

Why AI Acceptance Criteria? 

Well-defined Acceptance Criteria is key to ensuring that the features you plan to build are the features that get built. AI can help define that criterion in a number of ways, including:

Simplifying and accelerating issue creation

Project planning can be tedious – especially when you have to create new issues AND think about the acceptance criteria for those issues to be considered complete. Our AI Acceptance Criteria feature alleviates this burden, providing a strong first draft of your acceptance criteria that project managers can refine as needed. 

Provide a standardized format for acceptance criteria

Too often, it’s easy to unconsciously skip vital project details, assuming team members are all on the same page. Zenhub’s AI Acceptance Criteria counters this by establishing a standardized framework based on the popular Behavior-Driven Development format to ensure alignment and thoroughness when it comes to defining acceptance criteria.

Create and maintain clarity throughout the lifecycle of the issue

Issues (usually) pass through multiple hands before being closed.  Because of this, having an accurate, shared understanding of the issue’s objectives is crucial to ensuring smooth hand-offs.  Optimizing acceptance criteria with AI ensures you’re providing clear answers to your team’s queries about an issue, minimizing misunderstandings and reducing the need for offline conversations.

Help guide quality assurance (QA) testing

Generating thorough, well-formatted acceptance criteria can also act as a “testing checklist” for your QA team to ensure all required functionalities of a feature are working properly. 

Embrace the future with Zenhub’s AI Acceptance Criteria

By incorporating AI Acceptance Criteria into your project planning, you’re not just accelerating your processes–you’re improving the quality of the planning itself. With clearer, standardized, and faster issue creation, misunderstandings become a thing of the past. Your team can focus on what truly matters–building features that address the needs of the users. So, welcome to a new era of faster, more thorough project management!

Have questions about AI Acceptance criteria (or any of our other AI Project Management experiences)? Schedule a chat with our customer success team here.