Definition of ready

Definition of ready is the team's checklist for "we can sprint this." Most teams write one in their first retro, paste it in the wiki, and never look at it again. The version that earns its keep is short, explicit, and blocking — a story that fails it doesn't enter sprint planning.

What a useful checklist covers

• The user-facing outcome is in one sentence (no "as a..." gymnastics; just what changes).
• Acceptance criteria fit in three to five bullets.
• The story is small enough to fit in a sprint with room left.
• Dependencies on other teams are identified, and confirmed.
• If design is needed, it exists.
• The team has voted on it without spreading more than two card values.

The last item is the load-bearing one. A story that produced a 3-and-13 vote spread doesn't pass the readiness check. Either refinement explains the gap, or the story splits.

Definition of ready vs definition of done

Definition of ready gates entry into the sprint. Definition of done gates exit from it. They aren't symmetric — ready is about the story; done is about the work — and conflating them is how teams ship stories that pass acceptance criteria but don't actually solve the user's problem.

What goes wrong

Definition of ready becomes a wishlist instead of a gate. Stories enter the sprint without meeting it because "we don't have anything else to work on." Two sprints later the team is missing velocity targets and the unready stories are the carry-over. The fix is institutional: if there are no ready stories, the team picks up a refinement task, not an unready story.

Adjacent: when the team can't agree on a number — usually a definition-of-ready failure; common mistakes covers the broader patterns.