The Digimod Digimod’s agile scrum practice requires a well considered definition of ready. The DoR takes into account a number of criteria that must be met in order for a user story to be properly prioritized in the backlog and put into a sprint. The following topics need to be known at the Epic level:
Description: This is the basic simple sentences to describe starting state, activities or tasks undertaken as a part of the storyepic and stories, and the desired outcome. It should take a user-centric point of view, and should follow the Cucumber/Gherkin syntax so it can easily stub a testing scenario.
Acceptance Criteria: The explicit single success metric that the story epic and stories must meet. Often this should answer the question “how can this demonstrate value to the user?”.
Alignment: How does this story epic align with the four fundamentals of product development (Valuable, Usable, Feasible, Viable)? Equity Criteria: Does this story require an additional GBA+ lens? Stories that require this can be labelled with Review_EquityUncertainty with alignment could provide a strong signal that the work is not yet ready to start.
Risks: What are the known risk factors that could negatively impact the scope, timelines or budget? Could there be issues beyond the control of the scrum team to deliver the issue within the sprint and within the estimated effort? Stories that require this can labelled with Review_Risks.
Equity Criteria: Does this story require an additional GBA+ lens? These can most often be surfaced as accessibility, readability issues, but also a chance to address gender and racial bias in the content, to consider performance and bandwidth as equity issues, and to examine and escalate security tasks as factors of trust. Stories that require this can be labelled with Review_Equity.
Known Dependencies: If this story is dependent on one or many other stories, a brief mention can be made here. Stories that have known dependencies can be labelled with Known_Dependencies, and should have those stories/tasks/bugs linked.
Needs Documentation: If this story needs new documentation to be created or existing documentation to be updated, it can be labelled with Docs_Needed.
If any of these If any of these criteria are unknown, a question needs to be raised whether or not the work is ready to proceed. However, sometimes they simply do not apply, and the section can be simply given the text N/A.
The following text can be used as a template for creating new user storiesEpics, or the story User Epic Template V1 V2 can be cloned.
Description
Given [state], [activity], so that [outcome]
Acceptance Criteria
…
Alignment
Valuable
…
Usable
…
Feasible
…
Viable
…
...
Risks
Risks to scope of work
…
Risks to timeline
…
Risks to cost
…
Equity Criteria
…
Known Dependencies
…
Needs Documentation
…
User stories that are children of the epic must have at a minimum a description and acceptance criteria that illustrates how this story ties into the epic, as well as any other factors such as equity or risk criteria that make the story.