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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 defined as either automatic or manual. 

Automatic 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. Some will apply only at task or project level. Some will be mandatory and some can be switched on for specific projects

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. 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 may be defined as mandatory or optional. If a mandatory check is not met on a branch, it will block promotion of that branch's content. 

SAC are presented to authors as checklist items in either the task details (for task level SAC) or project page (for project level SAC).

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.