Definition of Ready: Get things clear!
When should a team start working? When should the team say yes or no to a story being included in the sprint backlog? These are some of the questions that a clearly defined Definition of Ready can answer.
The team needs to have a clear idea of what they need in order to commit to working on and completing a story. They are responsible for not setting themselves up for failure. Enter the Definition of Ready. Scrum Inc. presents the following definition:
Having a Definition of Ready means that stories must be immediately actionable. The Team must be able to determine what needs to be done and the amount of work required to complete the User Story or PBI. The Team must understand the “done” criteria and what tests will be performed to demonstrate that the story is complete. “Ready” stories should be clear, concise, and most importantly, actionable.
The Product Owner and Development team shares the responsibility to ensure that a story or task conform to the standard that is set during team collaboration. While writing stories, the Product Owner should always keep in mind what the Development team needs in order to start working on an item immediately.
One of the ways to help ensure that the story conforms to a few basic principles is by using the INVEST criteria. I explore this deeper in this article.
Although it can be seemingly simple to create a checklist to which each story should conform, the practical implementation can be quite tricky. In an ideal world, the Product Owner and the Development team are on exactly the same wavelength where in practice they seldom are. The Product Owner has a primarily business orientated viewpoint where the Development team has a technical one.
Although there can be some basic guidelines in place there needs to be a moment in time where these two worlds collide and a beautiful, fully formed story emerges. A refinement session either during the iteration or as part of the planning meeting works well for this.
During such a session, the team can ‘interrogate’ the product owner until they have maximum transparency. Once they have had the conversation, the Development team should be ready to weight the story and start working on it. The ‘checklist’ should assist in starting a pointed valuable conversation but it should not be an absolute.
An example of a Definition of Ready definition:
- The story should have clear acceptance criteria
- The story should conform to the INVEST criteria
- Detailed background information on why it is required
- A design of the expected end result (Wireframe)
- A clear scope (also mention what is outside the scope if possible)
- Test scenario’s
As can be seen from the example, there are some technical and nontechnical elements. As with any Scrum artifact collaboration and communication is key.
Jeff Sutherland explains this concept further.
