I keep seeing heated discussions about Definition of Ready (DoR) and Definition of Done (DoD) in a Scrum team. People argue whether they’re part of Scrum and whether they’re necessary.
Kanban note: You still have these in Kanban, although they’re merely two of the many policies that you’re likely to define, and you may not give them special names.
So let’s be clear, you already have both of these in your team today, regardless of whether you call them that, or have them written down, or have even given them a minute of thought.
Your team already has some shared agreement of what it means for the work to be done. It may not be well thought out and we may not all agree on the specific edges, but it’s there. If you ask someone “is it done?”, they’ll be able to give you an answer based on what they think done means. That’s your Definition of Done.
You also already have some shared agreement of what it means for the work being ready to be started. Nobody is going to knowingly start a piece of work that they think isn’t ready, so we already have some idea of what that might mean. “Can we start this work?” is a question that has an answer and that’s your Definition of Ready.
Having arguments about whether these are necessary or if you really have to have them are pointless. You already have both of these. They may be ill-defined and not very useful, but they exist.
The real question is whether we should have better versions of both. Should we, as a group, come to a more formal agreement of what Ready and Done really mean? Should we document these?
In my experience, effective teams do discuss these and come up with a shared understanding.
I would suggest that writing them down after we’ve had the discussion is a positive practice. It’s good to have a record of the decisions that we’ve made.
Why would we want good versions of DoR and DoD?
Any team that wants to track flow metrics absolutely needs a good understanding of both, or else their metrics will be completely useless. Being able to track cycletime, work in progress, throughput, or work item aging has to have a good understanding of when the work started and/or finished. That’s DoR and DoD.
Same if you want to do probabilistic forecasting, to determine when the work will be done. That requires metrics, which requires accurate DoR and DoD values.
In conclusion, you already have DoR and DoD, although if you’re still having discussions about whether you need them, they’re probably not useful. If you want to be effective, it’s worth making them useful.