Service Acceptance Criteria (SAC) and Authoring Acceptance Gateway (AAG) controls

What are Service Acceptance Criteria (SAC)?

Service Acceptance Criteria (SAC) are used to assure that authored SNOMED CT content meets specific quality measures before the content can be promoted. The purpose of this is to ensure a specific level of quality is met at each promotion level. This in turn assures the quality of the content that is eventually promoted to the code system branch, with the benefit of minimising the quality checks required at that level (in general, the later the stage of the content release process, the greater the amount of work needed to correct any issues, so catching issues earlier in the process has many benefits).

SAC may be either automated or manual. 

Automated SAC are checks which the system can sign off automatically without user intervention.

Manual SAC are checks that require sign-off via a particular user interaction, with that interaction governed by role-based access controls.

SAC may also be mandatory or optional.

Mandatory SAC block branch promotion until their required conditions are satisfied.

Optional SAC do not block promotion, but best practice would be to inform the Project Manager and/or Project Lead of reasons for promoting without the check being satisfied (an example may be a task-level spelling check, which might depend on the nature of the content being changed, and the availability of related spell-checking resources).

SAC are defined at the global level by users with the ADMIN role, as are their mapping to required RBAC roles. This is currently constrained as a technical support feature.

Globally defined SAC are then available as an options list to those with relevant permissions (set by RBAC role group definitions on the branch or its parents), to decide which to include in task-level or project-level gateway controls.

SAC are presented as checklist items in either the task details (for task level SAC) or project view (for project level SAC). The ability to modify the manual items to check them off via the AP user interface is a permission granted by the role assigned to each item in the SAC list. Task level manual SAC are usually available to all authors. Some project level manual SAC may also be available to all authors, but many will require additional permissions such as those for Project Managers or Project Leads to update (specific role mappings are set in the SAC global configuration definitions).

Some aspects of acceptance gateway controls are implicit in the AP branch promotion process - for instance diverged content branches cannot be promoted: each branch must be rebased from its immediate parent branch with all merge conflicts resolved before the branch can be promoted.