# A Prompt For Writing Acceptance Criteria That Testers Accept

> Force the negative and edge cases; the happy path writes itself.

- **Author:** [Wanjiru Kamau (@wanjiru_kamau)](https://www.promptabide.com/wanjiru_kamau)
- **Published:** 2026-05-06
- **Updated:** 2026-08-22
- **Tags:** `product`, `requirements`, `qa`, `agile`
- **Views:** 4682
- **Likes:** 606

## Prompt

```
Generated acceptance criteria are all happy path. Three Given/When/Thens, all of them the successful case, none of them worth writing down.

Fix it by demanding a ratio:

"Write acceptance criteria for [feature]. Format: Given/When/Then.

At most 2 happy-path criteria. Then at least 8 covering:
- Every validation failure, individually
- Permission denied, for each role that can reach the screen
- Concurrency: the same action twice, or two users at once
- The empty state and the 'too many' state
- What happens if the downstream call times out
- What is explicitly out of scope

Mark any criterion where the correct behaviour is a product decision I still need to make."

That last line surfaces the arguments early. On the last feature it flagged four genuinely undecided behaviours that would otherwise have been decided by whoever implemented it.
```

## Output

*Produced by Claude · claude-sonnet-4.*

```
AC-7  Given a draft owned by another user, When I open its edit URL directly, Then I get a 403 page, not an empty editor.
AC-9  Given I submit the form twice within 2s, When the second request arrives, Then only one record exists.
AC-12 [PRODUCT DECISION NEEDED] Given the post is already published, When the author deletes it, Then — do existing comments survive?
```

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