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Definition of Ready Checklist Builder

Free tool

Definition of Ready

  • ☐ Acceptance criteria are written and agreed
  • ☐ The business value or user benefit is clear
  • ☐ The team has enough context to size it
  • ☐ Dependencies on other teams or systems are identified
  • ☐ Design or UX assets exist, if the story needs them
  • ☐ There is a clear way to verify it is done
  • ☐ No known blocker prevents starting immediately
  • ☐ It is small enough to fit in one sprint

8 of 8 items selected

Checklist set - now estimate the work it applies to.

Why a Definition of Ready exists

A Definition of Ready is the team's own agreed bar a story clears before it enters a sprint - without one, "ready" means whatever the person running refinement happened to feel that day, which produces stories that turn out to be unstartable the moment a sprint begins. It's a upstream fix for the single most common estimation problem: a team trying to size work nobody fully understands yet.

Using the checklist

The default items on this page are a common starting set, not a standard - every team's Definition of Ready should reflect what has actually caused problems for that team specifically. Uncheck anything that doesn't apply, and add the custom items that capture your team's real recurring gotchas (a specific compliance sign-off, a particular team's dependency, whatever keeps causing stories to stall mid-sprint).

What it isn't

A Definition of Ready is a gate for entering a sprint, not a gate for being written down in the backlog at all - most items should exist as rough, not-yet-ready entries long before they clear this bar. Applying the full checklist to every backlog item, not just the ones about to be pulled into a sprint, turns refinement into unnecessary overhead.

Frequently asked questions

The team's own agreed bar a story clears before entering a sprint - without one, "ready" means whatever refinement happened to decide that day.
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