Definition of ready and done

Two short checklists a team writes for itself: one for when a piece of work is ready to be started, one for when it is genuinely finished. They turn “I think it’s done” into a shared, visible agreement, which is most of what stops half-finished work piling up.

Definition of ready

A backlog item is ready to pull when the team could start it without a scavenger hunt for missing detail. Ours usually asks:

• The goal and the user are clear, and the value is understood.
• Acceptance criteria are written, and you could test against them.
• Dependencies and unknowns are named, not lurking.
• It is small enough to finish inside a normal cycle. If not, slice it smaller.

Definition of done

Done means done, not “done bar the tests”. A typical definition:

• Acceptance criteria met and demonstrated.
• Tested at the right levels, and the checks are green. See test strategy.
• Reviewed, merged and shipped through the normal pipeline.
• Documentation and monitoring updated wherever they needed to be.

Make it yours

Write these with the team, keep them somewhere everyone sees them, and revisit them in a retrospective when they stop matching reality. A definition nobody remembers is not doing its job.