The Digimod definition of ready 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:
Description: This is the basic simple sentences to describe starting state, activities or tasks undertaken as a part of the story, 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 must meet.
Alignment: How does this story 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_Equity
Risks: What are the known risk factors? 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
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 criteria do not apply, the section can be simply given the text N/A
The following text can be used as a template for creating new user stories, or the story User Template V1 can be cloned.
Description
Given [state], [activity], so that [outcome]
Acceptance Criteria
…
Alignment
Valuable
…
Usable
…
Feasible
…
Viable
…
Equity Criteria
…
Risks
…
Known Dependencies
…
Needs Documentation
…