Under what circumstances should acceptance criteria be allowed to change?

Acceptance (or completion) criteria are defined to make clear when a particular project deliverable, solution element can be considered complete and ready for the project's customers. They're essentially a quality control mechanism, established early in the project and used to judge progress and completion along the way.

After you've taken the time and trouble to define acceptance criteria expressing what this project needs to deliver, it seems reasonable that we wouldn't want these criteria to ever change. But that simply isn't realistic. Some acceptance criteria will evolve as more is known later in the project. And there are valid situations where the acceptance criteria must flex to accommodate changing needs or constraints on a project:…

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