Question 1

What are acceptance criteria?

Accepted Answer

Acceptance criteria are the concrete, testable conditions that tell a team when a user story is done. They turn a one-line story into a QA checklist — each criterion is something a tester can verify pass or fail without ambiguity. The Gherkin Given/When/Then format is the most common way to write them because it separates preconditions, action, and expected outcome so the criteria read as behaviour, not implementation.

Question 2

What does "Given / When / Then" actually mean?

Accepted Answer

It's the Gherkin template from the Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) community. Given = the state of the world before the action (signed-in user, empty cart, permission granted). When = the action being tested (clicks Share, submits the form, receives a 429). Then = the observable outcomes (the modal opens, the row is saved, the toast appears). If you can't write a Given/When/Then for a story, the story probably isn't specific enough yet.

Question 3

How many scenarios should one user story have?

Accepted Answer

Usually 4–6 for a meaningful story. Fewer than three usually means you're only testing the happy path. More than eight usually means the story is actually two stories in disguise — try splitting. The ideal mix is roughly one or two happy-path scenarios, two or three edge cases, and at least one error case. Error cases are the ones teams forget most often.

Question 4

What's the difference between a happy path, an edge case, and an error?

Accepted Answer

Happy path = the user does the thing correctly and succeeds. Edge case = the input is unusual but valid (an empty list, a name with emoji, a slow network). Error = the input is invalid or the system fails (missing required field, 500, rate-limit hit, auth expired). Every story should have all three types covered before it's ready to ship, because each one catches different classes of bug.

Question 5

Can I paste these into Cucumber, Playwright, or Jest-Gherkin?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The Given/When/Then structure maps directly to .feature files in Cucumber, SpecFlow, Behave, and Playwright-bdd. You can copy a scenario into any of those frameworks and fill in the step definitions. If you capture your email we'll send a pre-formatted .feature bundle with one file per scenario. Jira and Linear both also accept Gherkin in their description fields for backlog visibility.

Question 6

How is this different from asking ChatGPT for acceptance criteria?

Accepted Answer

This generator returns structured JSON — every scenario has a type (happy_path / edge_case / error), a title, and separate Given / When / Then arrays. ChatGPT gives you prose that changes format from query to query. The prompt also explicitly requires coverage of all three types and rejects untestable Then clauses (no 'the user feels confident'), so you don't have to rewrite the output to make it usable.

Question 7

Do you store my input?

Accepted Answer

Your input is retained for up to 30 days purely for abuse monitoring and generation quality review. We never train models on it and never share it with third parties. You can request deletion any time by emailing support@vibemap.ai. If you capture your email we'll include an unsubscribe link with every message.

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