Items at the top of the backlog are ready to be moved into a sprint so that the development team can confidently commit and complete them by the end of a sprint.

A checklist of conditions that must be true before a product backlog item is considered ready to pull into a sprint during sprint planning. Contrast with definition of done.

Some Scrum teams formalize this idea by establishing a definition of ready. You can think of the definition of ready and the definition of done as two states of product backlog items during a sprint cycle:

DoR: Ready state from PB to Sprint Backlog

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Swipe to start

A checklist of the types of work that the team is expected to successfully complete by the end of the sprint, before it can declare its work to be potentially shippable. A bare-minimum definition of done should yield a complete slice of product functionality, one that has been designed, built, integrated, tested, and documented and will deliver validated customer value. Contrast with definition of ready.

You can think of the definition of ready and the definition of done as two states of product backlog items during a sprint cycle:

DoD: Done before the potentially shipable product increment is ready

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Both the definition of done and the definition of ready are checklists of the work that must be completed before a product backlog item can be considered to be in the respective state.

An example of a definition-of-ready checklist for product backlog items might be:

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
  • Business value is clearly articulated.
  • Details are sufficiently understood by the development team so it can make an informed decision as to whether it can complete the PBI.
  • Dependencies are identified and no external dependencies would block the PBI from being completed.
  • Team is staffed appropriately to complete the PBI.
  • The PBI is estimated and small enough to comfortably be completed in one sprint.
  • Acceptance criteria are clear and testable.
  • Performance criteria, if any, are defined and testable.
  • Scrum team understands how to demonstrate the PBI at the sprint review.

A strong definition of ready will substantially improve the Scrum team’s chance of successfully meeting its sprint goal.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

each agile team has its own DoD – team agrees on and displays somewhere in the team room or in slack or …

  • Assumptions of User Story met
  • Project builds without errors (for features)
  • Unit tests written and passing
  • Project deployed on the test environment identical to production platform
  • Feature ok-ed by UX designer/Product Owner
  • QA is done & all issues resolved
  • Feature is tested against acceptance criteria
  • Any configuration or build changes documented
  • Documentation updated
  • All unit tests passing (esp. for sprints)
  • The performance tests passed
  • All bugs fixed
  • Sprint marked as ready for the production deployment by the Product Owner
  • All unit & functional tests are green (especially for releases)
  • All the acceptance criterias are met
  • Check that TDD and continuous integration is verified and working

a clear definition of when it is considered “done” – a list of criteria which must be met before a product increment (user story)

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Start

  • DoR
  • DoD
  • DoR + DoD
  • Definition of Ready examples
  • Definition of Done examples
Share Tweet
Scrum checklists