The Definition of Ready

Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of the Scrum framework, called out that one of the main reasons that many Scrum projects fail is due to teams working on items that are simply not ready to be worked on. They are either too ambiguous, not understood by business and technical stakeholders, too big, or they lack ambiguity as to the scope of the item in question.

Many teams have chosen to adopt the practice of having a Definition of Ready to mitigate this risk. The Definition of Done practice has been popular with Agile teams for many years—we will explore that later in this chapter. The Definition of Ready has been less utilized. A good way to look at this, like every practice in the Open Practice Library, is as a tool that can be taken out of the toolbox to address a problem. If a team is struggling to get work done because of ambiguity and a lack of shared understanding before even starting it, adding a Definition of Ready may improve the team's success...