You may have perfectionists in your life. You know the type, the ones that work on a project tweaking and “finishing up” until the deadline has long passed. So, what’s the harm?
The harm associated with perfectionism can lead to delays or even stop a project. So how do you know when it’s time to call it a finished project? Well, that is like answering the question “Are we done yet?”  and it requires defining objective acceptance criteria. How the acceptance criteria are worded is important. Here is an example of how vague acceptance criteria can muddle the answer to the question.
Example: Working on an application that processes credit card authorization, you can have two acceptance criteria. The first is “The application should process credit card authorizations quickly”. The second is “Processing a credit card authorization should take no more than 1 second 90% of the time and no more than 3 seconds ever”.Â
The first statement is vague and can lead a perfectionist team to focus on optimization and speed which is a fun task indeed. The second statement is objectively testable by anyone with access to the system. Pull out your stop-watch and press “authorize”. Either the system responded within 3 seconds (quickly enough) or not. No ambiguity. This means the team knows when it is done and can move on to other tasks.
Objective acceptance criteria have more benefits:
- Perfectionists have less wiggle room to continue working on one task.
- You know when the software works correctly because all acceptance criteria pass.
- There is no ambiguity on which features are included or not included in the software.
- It also provide a talking point: is the acceptance criteria feasible?
Acceptance criteria should be defined carefully as the criteria focuses the team’s attention on what is important in that what you measure is what you get. Normally acceptance criteria are tied to business value, a topic for another blog post.
How do you know when you are done your tasks?
