When is a Team Ready to Start Sprinting in Agile?
A team is ready to sprint after sprint planning. During sprint planning, the team pulls user stories out of the product backlog and pulls them into a sprint. A team is ready to sprint when all the user stories in the sprint backlog meet the Definition of Ready (DOR) criteria.
The team discusses the user story and acceptance criteria for the user story. Once the user story is understood and the team agrees it's ready to be worked on, they will provide a story points estimate. Once the story point estimates are completed, the team will calculate their capacity by determining the maximum number of story points achievable in a sprint. The team will then pull user stories into the sprint until the sprint's maximum number of story points is reached. The number of user stories added into the sprint will not exceed the total number of available story points.
Definition of Ready (DOR) is an essential concept in sprint planning. DOR is the criteria by which the team will accept a card into a sprint. The team decides if a user story is ready for a sprint after discussing the user story and acceptance criteria. DOR varies from team to team, but typically, the user story's acceptance criteria should be easily understood and complete enough to create a story point estimate and start working on the story once the sprint begins. DOR may also include having infrastructure or database changes completed before the team pulls the card into a sprint.
Establish Definition of Ready (DOR) in the team's working agreement. Since each team works on different platforms with specific development needs, the DOR criteria can vary widely between teams.
Development teams can get a bit overly demanding in their DOR criteria. Remember, Agile is based on just enough, not full-blown design down to the smallest of details. Product Owners and Scrum Masters should carefully ensure the DOR criteria isn't too heavy or excessive for the Product Owner to provide. Velocity can suffer when the Product Owner or Business Analyst spends too much time on the detailed design. Example of DOR:
- The user story is understood and clear by the team
- The acceptance criteria for the user story is understood and clear by the team
- The user story has story points assigned
- The sprint capacity or the total number of story points planned for development are agreed upon by the team
- The team has all the tools, supplies, materials, environments, data, security, and other components to start work immediately. We don't put user stories into a sprint if we are dependent on a vendor or other team to perform work before we can develop and deploy the user story. We do not put user stories in a sprint with external dependencies.
