Acceptance criteria

A criterion is a statement that can be true or false, checked by the buyer, on the buyer's data. “The catalogue is imported” is not one. “All 8,500 products appear with a price, a category and at least one image, and the count matches the source file” is. The difference is not pedantry: the first is settled by discussion and the second is settled by looking.

Writing them first is uncomfortable, which is the whole reason it is skipped. It forces decisions while everyone is still optimistic — what the price actually is, what happens on the edge cases, who supplies the content — and postponing that feels like keeping momentum. There is never a natural later moment, so what happens instead is that criteria appear at the end, written by the supplier, describing the thing that was built.

After which the buyer has no instrument. Whatever arrived meets a standard written to fit it, and no work has been done wrong by that measure. Every dispute later in the engagement traces back to this point, and it is the cheapest thing in the entire relationship to fix.

Accepting criteria that only the supplier can evaluate

“Performance is improved”, “the architecture is scalable”, “the code follows best practice” — each requires the supplier to judge whether it has been met. A criterion the buyer cannot check alone is not a criterion, it is a description. Rewrite it until somebody non-technical could run it: a number, a count, a page that loads, a file that opens.

Somebody will quote this number at you.

Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.

Writing a specification you can accept work against

“Here is the brief. Redesign the site, improve the funnel, modernise the stack.” · 60 minutes, 5 questions.

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Reading a quotation for technical work

“The whole project comes to AED 45,000, four to six weeks.” · 30 minutes, 5 questions.

Scope of work

What is being bought, written so that it can be finished — which means written backwards from the acceptance criteria rather than forwards from the wish.

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Change order

The written record that scope moved and what it now costs — and in the UAE, the thing without which the extra work is not billable.

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Handover

The point at which a vendor's work becomes the company's property — defined by what is transferred, not by the project being finished.

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Adversarial test set

The questions written specifically to make the system invent an answer — and the only acceptance evidence that means anything.

All ninety-five termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.