Definition of Ready

The Definition of Ready shows you how easy it would be for the team to start working on the story, i.e. to refine the story. It shows in what format, extent and way the surrounding organisation should communicate the needs and requirements to the team.

Should you have such a fortunate situation that the team gets outside help in preparing the stories for the team, you can benefit from the Definition of Ready. Using the DoR, the individuals preparing the stories know what the goal is. However, in such a situation you can stop and think if those individuals should in fact be members of the team.

Here is the simplified life cycle of a story in relation to Definition of Ready and Definition of Done:

If you have an empowered, independent team solving specific problems hand-picked by the product owner, you don't really need a Definition of Ready. In a way not needing a Definition of Ready indicates that your team has the necessary skills and means to work and it operates in a mature way and in a mature environment where no gates are called for. And without gates, information flows more freely.

As I mentioned above, Definition of Ready provides a clear criteria for people preparing stories for refining. But many experienced agilists warn us about the DoR. While it is a powerful tool for preparing for a sprint, it leads very easily away from an agile way of working and into a two-step waterfall process. In addition, if the team doesn't even look at a story before it meets a specified criteria, the story starts benefiting from the team's collective experience only after the DoR is met.

A strict criteria for passing a gate is indeed the mark of a waterfall process. The agile way is to work on all of these process steps in parallel. Instead of finishing a large amount of planning, then design and finally implementation and testing, the agile team does the steps in sufficiently small portions and thus avoiding some waste.

To avoid strict criteria, which might prevent a highly valuable story from being worked on, the Definition of Ready should be formulated in a more flexible way. In contrast to the Definition of Done, flexibility is an asset for the DoR. When using a DoD when accepting a deliverable for release, it should be clear if the criteria is passed or not, but when picking stories for the sprint, the criteria should be about story value.

With the Definition of Done and the user story acceptance criteria we need absolute, binary (yes/no) which is easy to test against. The story either passes the criteria or it doesn't.