The Importance of Definitions in Agile

You and your team are in your sprint planning meeting, trying to determine the stories to be included in your next sprint. There is a plethora of stories in the backlog, but how do you know what you can pick up and work with?

Let me introduce my good friend, who is far too often neglected and ignored, the Definition of Ready.

This little chap can take away so much of the pain I have seen in various agile teams, and yet he is often not fully defined, and if defined all too often not adhered to.

A simple example would be:

• The story has a detailed description

• The acceptance criteria have been defined and agreed with the team

• The story has been fully estimated for all areas

• The story has been prioritised

Simple, right? And if you stick to this little checklist you get to avoid all the all-too-common gotchas that come from trying to define as you go.

• How can you estimate a story that isn't defined?

• How do your developers and testers know what to do with no acceptance criteria?

• How can you plan a sprint if you don't know what is in it?

Obviously, sometimes things go wrong and mistakes are made. We have all no doubt seen a story that, once you dig under the surface, blows the estimate to pieces dute to the complexity, or a test estimate that goes through the roof once some more detailed analysis takes place.

The iterative nature of Agile helps mitigate that, but if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail. If you will forgive the cliche.

Once you have completed work on a story, how do you know it is finished?

Well, we have another very important friend, the Definition of Done.

This is where the team agrees what Done looks like for them.

Again, a simple example would be:

• The code changes have been made and comitted

• Unit tests have been written and passed

• Any manual or automated testing has been completed

• Any failing tests have been agreed with the stakeholders

• The change has been demoed to the stakeholders

• The change has been successfully deployed

A little checklist to make sure everyone is focused on what the outcomes should be.

Simple things can make a lot of difference to the success of a team, and the best ones I have worked with have always started with definitions. I cannot recommend them enough.