The product backlog consists of the wide variety of items such as – new requirements, enhancements, bug fixes, refactoring stories, etc. but to MAKE sure the items are in a STATE for a team to commit is really important. To elaborate more, the items which the team commit in a sprint should meet a few criteria to make sure it has everything required to work upon it.

The definition of Ready is an agreement between the team and the product owner where the backlog items have to pass through a few agreed points to mark it as ready. For EXAMPLE, Definition of Ready for a story will have USER Story defined, User Story dependencies identified, User Story sized by the delivery team, performance criteria identified, no open questions, the team has a good idea what it will mean to Demo the User Story.

In the same way, we can have the definition of ready for the features as well. Although, the components might differ from product to product. This shared definition then allows the team to discard the stories that don’t have clearly defined ACCEPTANCE criteria. It will save a lot of time if each user story meets Definition of Ready before the Sprint Planning meeting.