Definition of Ready
A Definition of Done guards what leaves the sprint. A Definition of Ready guards what gets into it — and it is the cheaper of the two to skip and the more expensive to have skipped.
Why it exists
A team that estimates a story it does not understand produces a number, and the number is treated as real for the rest of the sprint. The gap does not disappear; it surfaces on day six, as a surprise. And because the estimate is what everyone remembers, the team concludes it is bad at estimating rather than that the story was never ready.
Running the checklist costs a few minutes per story. Discovering the gap mid-sprint costs the sprint.
The six checks
The value is clear
Who wants this, and what is different for them once it ships.
Acceptance criteria written
Someone who did not write the story could tell whether it is done.
Fits inside a sprint
If it cannot finish in one sprint it is an epic. Split it before sizing it.
Dependencies identified
Anything needed from another team is named, and someone owns chasing it.
Testable
The team already knows how this gets verified, not just how it gets built.
Design or spec available
Where the work needs one. Otherwise the estimate quietly includes designing it.
One person is enough to hold it open
Readiness is not a majority decision. It is a question about whether the people who will do the work understand it, so a single unresolved "no" is the entire signal — and voting it down teaches that person not to raise it next time.
Which is why it matters who is holding a check open. "Someone flagged this" leads nowhere. "Ben flagged the acceptance criteria" is a two-minute conversation with an obvious next step.
"Fits inside a sprint" is the one to take seriously
Of the six, this is the check most worth stopping for. A story that cannot finish inside one sprint is an epic, and an epic has no honest estimate — whatever number the room lands on is a guess at something nobody has scoped, and the team gets held to it anyway.
When it comes up, ask what the smallest useful slice would be and put the rest back on the backlog as its own story. Splitting here costs five minutes.
Ready enough, not perfect
A Definition of Ready used as a gate becomes its own bottleneck — stories queue in refinement waiting for a design that nobody needs yet, and the checklist starts costing more than it saves.
The useful version is lighter: the checks are a prompt for a conversation, and a story can be sized with a known gap as long as the gap is written down and owned. What you must not do is size it and forget the gap existed. A number the room could not fully stand behind should not look identical to one it could.
What to do with what is left over
Every session produces questions nobody could answer. Those are worth more than the estimates — they are the sprint failures that have not happened yet. Give each one a name and a next step before the meeting ends. Anything raised and left unowned comes back mid-sprint as a surprise, and the team blames the estimate rather than the gap.
Common questions
What is a Definition of Ready?
A short checklist a story should satisfy before the team tries to estimate it — the counterpart to a Definition of Done.
How is Definition of Ready different from Definition of Done?
Definition of Ready is about whether work can be sized and started. Definition of Done is about whether finished work can ship.
Who decides whether a story is ready?
Anyone in the room, and one person should be enough to hold a check open.
Next: Planning Poker — how to size the stories that pass the checklist.
Run it, rather than read about it. Free, and nobody needs an account — share a six-character code and start.
Start a session