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Acceptance criteria are the specific conditions a ticket must satisfy to be considered done. Waterline extracts them from your tickets and matches each one to code evidence in your repository. The quality of your criteria directly affects the quality of Waterline’s analysis. Vague criteria produce uncertain scores. Specific, testable criteria produce clear, reliable results.

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Vague vs. specific

Specific criteria give Waterline concrete signals to match against code. Vague criteria produce low-confidence results across the board.

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Good examples

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How criteria affect the score

Each criterion is independently evaluated and classified: The overall progress percentage counts SATISFIED criteria fully and PARTIAL criteria at half weight. PARTIAL signals work in progress — it contributes to the score, but less than done work. See Progress Score for the full explanation.

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Adding criteria to Jira

Waterline reads from both the Description field and a dedicated Acceptance Criteria field if one exists. In the Description, write criteria as a bullet list:

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Adding criteria to GitHub Issues or Asana

Use a task list in the issue or task body:
Waterline treats each list item as a criterion — checkbox state is ignored. Completion is determined by code evidence, not the checkbox.

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When Waterline says “no criteria found”

Waterline shows a warning and offers to analyze anyway using the full ticket description. Results without explicit criteria are less precise. Add explicit criteria to the ticket and re-analyze to get a reliable score.