A performance adjective becomes useful only when its measurement is agreed
A search interaction and an overnight report place different demands on the system and on the person waiting for it. Combining them under one speed adjective can produce a test that is easy to pass but irrelevant to daily work. The reviewer should first identify the action whose delay matters and the point at which its result becomes usable. A search may need the correct source opened, whereas a batch report may need a completed file with all required sections. The workload should describe representative folder size or report inputs rather than an empty demonstration. A useful comparison measures both successful completion and elapsed time, because a quick incomplete result should not satisfy the requirement. If the source provides no threshold, the project should record a proposed target as a decision still to be made.
Working through the example
A proposal promises fast document search, but a two-second lookup and a ten-minute overnight report are both discussed in the same folder. Split interactive search from batch reporting. Ask for a response-time measure, workload, and acceptable boundary for each behavior before drafting a numeric acceptance criterion.
A discriminating check
Present the owner with two workloads that make the same word imply different targets. The appropriate threshold is a project decision; research does not supply a universal speed target for every organization. The ambiguity research cited here motivates explicit terminology review. The project’s scoped glossary and unresolved qualifiers are design adaptations, not a claim to reproduce the studied tool.