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Acceptance criteria are defined as a set of statements that establish the conditions under which a particular user story is considered complete and acceptable. Each criterion reflects a clear and specific requirement that must be met for the user story to pass or fail. This allows both developers and stakeholders to have a shared understanding of what success looks like for a given feature or product increment, ensuring alignment on expectations and helping to prevent misunderstandings during development.

By having clearly defined criteria, teams can systematically test the user story against these conditions, which facilitates accurate and efficient validation of whether the work meets the user’s needs and project’s goals. Additionally, having specific pass/fail results minimizes ambiguity, making it easier for teams to track progress and ascertain when a user story is ready for release.

The other options do touch on important aspects of project management and development but do not capture the precise definition of acceptance criteria. For instance, while guidelines for project development may encompass a broader scope of project methodologies and practices, acceptance criteria are specifically focused on defining what needs to be accomplished to finalize a user story. Similarly, final evaluation metrics and project timelines relate to overall project performance and scheduling rather than the specific conditions for user story completion.