Introducing acceptance criteria checks in Code Reviewer

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Make sure your code is meeting all your requirements

🚀 We’re adding a powerful new feature to Code Reviewer: acceptance criteria checks. Designed to bridge the gap between your requirements and your code, it’s now available to everyone in the Rovo Dev Agents beta. The gradual rollout will start on 21/July/2025.

What are acceptance criteria checks?

Acceptance criteria checks automatically compare the code in your pull request to requirements listed in your linked Jira work items. It’s like having a dedicated QA engineer to check if you’ve built what you said you would.

We added this feature to Code Reviewer so you can catch mistakes early. Software teams have told us checks like this could save time, prevent rework, and increase team alignment.

How it works

Acceptance criteria checks are available to everyone in the Rovo Dev Agents beta right now - to get started, just create a pull request and link it to a Jira work item.

Code Reviewer automatically scans the pull request and linked work items, then compares the code to any acceptance criteria it finds.

Code Reviewer will let you know which acceptance criteria:

• ✅ Are successfully met.

• Are missing from the code.

• Need manual checking.

How does Code Reviewer find acceptance criteria?

Code Reviewer collects acceptance criteria from the summary, description, and custom fields of work items linked to the pull request.

For Code Reviewer to find them, acceptance criteria need to be marked with the following titles (case sensitive):

• "Acceptance Criteria", "AC", or "ACs".

• "Business Requirements", "Functional Requirements", or "Requirements".

• "Definition of Done" or "DoD".

How to write effective acceptance criteria

To get the best results from acceptance criteria checks in Code Reviewer, here are a few tips:

• Use Atlassian Intelligence to turn your brainstormed thoughts into clear, structured work item descriptions.

• Use clear, unambiguous language.

• Describe what success means in measurable, positive terms.

• Keep each criteria statement short, and focused on one specific thing.

• Break large epics into smaller stories with clear “done” conditions.

• Once you find a format and structure that works for your team, use it as a template so you can quickly reuse it for all your work items.

Read more tips on Atlassian Community

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Known issues

• Complex criteria, and criteria not related to code changes (e.g. asking a developer to send a Slack message when work item is done) still require manual verification.

• Only currently supports acceptance criteria written in English.

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Turning acceptance criteria checks off

Turning it off

If your team needs to turn off the checks for some reason (like if you don’t use acceptance criteria in your workflow), you can turn it off for your repository.

Bitbucket repositories

Bitbucket repository admin permissions are required to turn off acceptance criteria checks.

1. Go to Repository Settings for your repository.

2. Select Code Reviewer from the side panel.

3. Turn off “Acceptance criteria check”.

GitHub repositories

Rovo Dev Agent admin permissions are required to turn off acceptance criteria checks on GitHub repositories.

1. Go to https://{your-site-name}.atlassian.net/dev-agents/

2. Under Code Reviewer, select Enable Code Reviewer on repositories.

3. Select GitHub, then Manage repositories from the list of organizations.

4. Select Manage settings from the list of repositories.

5. Turn off Acceptance criteria check.

Tell us what you think

We're always improving Code Reviewer, and we’d love to hear what you think about acceptance criteria checks.

To give us feedback, use the ratings on each Code Reviewer comment (:thumbsup: and :thumbsdown:) and add your detailed feedback in the box that appears. You can also leave your comments here on the Community site.

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What’s next

We’re currently working on:

• Comment customization so you can ask Code Reviewer to enforce your specific rules (like coding styles, interface design, or specific security requirements).

• Code suggestions so Code Reviewer will suggest code updates based on its feedback, and you can apply the changes without even opening your IDE.

• Adding acceptance criteria checks to Jira, so users who aren’t in the code can still keep track of which criteria have been met.

Join our waitlist to get early access to these features

Thank you for being a part of the Rovo Dev beta community!