Ready and Done

The tenth and last part of the product owner toolbox. The leave tool’s backlog is ranked. Two checklists remain, one at each end of the sprint.

Definition of Ready

The Definition of Ready is a checklist of criteria a backlog item has to meet before it can move from the product backlog into a sprint backlog.

It makes sure the information needed for the next step is there, so the team doesn’t start on items that aren’t specified well enough. Starting on those causes extra work and extra cost. The Definition of Ready is the team’s checklist for the quality of a backlog item. Its counterpart, the Definition of Done, is the checklist for the quality of the product increment.

Different kinds of items need different definitions. An epic is ready for different reasons than a story is.

The team writes the Definition of Ready together at the start, for each kind of item, and the whole team is responsible for keeping to it. Revisit it regularly, for example in the sprint retrospective. In practice, the usual reasons to change it are:

• the conditions around the project change,
• the backlog items aren’t good enough,
• the quality expectations grow.

A user story is ready when it:

• meets the INVEST criteria,
• is written so its readers understand it,
• has been agreed with the stakeholders,
• is consistent and doesn’t contradict itself,
• is clearly linked to its feature,
• has at least one acceptance criterion,
• is prioritised,
• describes the need, not a technical solution,
• is linked to the stories it depends on, if there are any.

A feature is ready when it:

• is written at a high level, for its readers,
• has been agreed with the stakeholders,
• is consistent in itself and with other features,
• serves a business need above it,
• has at least one acceptance criterion,
• is weighted by relevance or risk and prioritised,
• describes the need, not a technical solution,
• is split into stories in a way that can be traced,
• shows its dependencies on other features.

A warning: a Definition of Ready can turn into a waterfall gate. If the team refuses every story that isn’t perfect, the product owner starts writing specifications again, and we’re back to the forty-page document from part two. The Definition of Ready is there to start a conversation, not to replace one.

Definition of Done

The Definition of Done is the list of criteria an item has to meet before it can be set to “done”.

What matters is that it captures what the Scrum team and the stakeholders together mean by “done”. Again, different kinds of items need different definitions.

The Scrum team writes it together and includes requirements from outside the team, such as quality standards. The criteria can change over time, and the Definition of Done changes with them, usually in the retrospective. Put it somewhere everyone sees it often. A Definition of Done that lives on page 14 of a wiki doesn’t define anything.

A user story is done when:

• the code is written and meets the team’s standards,
• the acceptance criteria are met,
• all subtasks are done,
• unit and integration tests pass,
• bugs are fixed or put back into the backlog,
• the product owner has checked the increment and confirmed that the acceptance criteria are met.

A feature is done when:

• end-to-end integration is complete,
• the non-functional requirements are met,
• the regression tests pass,
• the user need it was written for is met.

Less is more. Start with four or five criteria that the team actually checks every time, and add more when you need them. A long list that nobody checks is worse than a short one everybody does.

What I’d keep

That’s the toolbox: vision, just-in-time specification, epics as bets, personas and journeys, features and story maps, stories and the three amigos, splitting, backlog management and priority poker, ready and done. Ten tools, one leave tool, from an Excel file to an absence that shows up in the team calendar.

If I could only keep three:

1. A vision that says no. It saves more discussions than any other tool and makes every later decision cheaper.
2. The conversation. Card, conversation, confirmation, with all three amigos in the room. Most bugs start as a misunderstanding that nobody talked through.
3. A short Definition of Done. Four or five lines the team really checks. It’s where quality stops being a promise.

Everything else helps. Those three are the ones I’d fight for in a team that has none of them.