Definition of Ready
The shared bar a story has to clear before it enters a sprint. Actor and outcome present, dependencies linked not assumed, fits in a sprint, and nobody walks out of refinement still confused.
Improve alert handling for on-call
On-call engineers acknowledge alerts in one click
'Improve' is not an outcome and 'we agreed in product review' is not a reason that survives the meeting. Pulling this into a sprint means the team negotiates the spec mid-flight.
Ready means actor, outcome, and reason are present, plus at least one testable acceptance criterion. The right story passes that bar; whoever pulls it knows exactly what 'done' looks like.
Customers see VAT on the invoice
Should be doable once the new tax service is live.
Customers see VAT on the invoice
Blocked by TAX-117 (tax service /v1/quote endpoint). Pull only after TAX-117 is in 'done'.
'Should be doable once the new service is live' is the kind of sentence that wastes a sprint. Without an explicit link, nobody knows whether the dependency is shipped, in progress, or still being argued about.
Dependencies linked, not assumed. When TAX-117 moves, the planning board sees the unblock. The team will not pull this story prematurely and discover the dependency after they have started.
Better filtering on the contacts page
Sales reps narrow contacts by lifecycle stage
Pointing back at a previous refinement makes the story unreadable to anyone who was not there or has since rotated off the team. The story is not yet a contract; it is a memory.
Nobody in the refinement room walks out saying 'I still do not really know what this is.' The actor, the four stages, the persistence behavior, and the demo path are all on the card.
Better reports for managers
Managers see weekly throughput per direct report
'More useful' is not an outcome. Without testable acceptance criteria, the team is guessing what 'better' means and will probably ship something that gets rejected in review.
Connextra clauses present, observable AC, named scope. Whoever pulls the story knows what to build, what to demo, and what success looks like. Ready.
Self-serve onboarding for enterprise tenants
Enterprise admin creates the organization and invites the team
Pulling a 13-pointer is taking a bet against the sprint. The team will discover halfway through that two of the three sub-flows are bigger than expected, miss the sprint, and re-split under pressure.
13 points is a signal, not an estimate. The right side has been sliced before being pulled: the first slice ships and the variations exist as named follow-ups. Definition of Ready means the slicing has already happened.