What are Salesforce best practices for writing acceptance criteria that a delivery team can build and test from?

1. Write them as observable behaviour, not as configuration instructions. “An error is displayed and the record is not saved” is testable; “add a validation rule” prescribes a solution and prevents the team choosing a better one.
2. Use Given/When/Then to force a precondition, an action, and a single verifiable outcome into each criterion.
3. State the persona or profile explicitly. In Salesforce, behaviour frequently differs by profile, permission set, record type, and sharing, so “the user” is rarely precise enough.
4. Cover the negative and edge paths, not just the happy path: what happens with no permission, with a null value, on a record owned by another user, or in bulk operations.
5. Keep them small. If a story needs more than roughly five to seven criteria, that is usually a signal the story should be split rather than the criteria expanded.