Agree on a Way of Working

Previous steps have discussed what is being built and when, but it is equally important to discuss how the team will work together to build it. Before getting started, teams need to make important decisions about how the extended team will work together during the project. These include:

1. Scheduling the key iteration meetings on a fixed cadence including: daily coordination meeting, iteration planning, iteration review, backlog grooming, acceptance demonstrations and the team retrospective
2. Design the development workflow and configure the project management tool (e.g. Jira) 
3. Define the deployment pipeline and configuration management process
4. Agree the Definition of Done (DoD) and Definition of Ready (DoR)
5. Testing strategy including these key decisions:
   1. How will user acceptance testing be performed?
   2. How will performance testing be performed?
   3. How will regulatory compliance testing be performed?

Definition of Ready

The Definition of Ready (DoR) establishes the criteria a story must meet in order for the delivery team to start working on it (i.e. a story is ready to be brought into an iteration.) If stories are not sufficiently understood at the start of an iteration, the team can be less efficient. They may become blocked from completing the story due to details that are missing or may incorrectly estimate it causing the plan to be missed.

Definition of Done

The Definition of Done (DoD) defines the criteria a story must meet in order for the delivery team to consider it complete. The DoD will include the required levels of testing and documentation and will ideally include all work needed for a story to be released to users. By setting this standard, the team ensures that all work for a story is done within the iteration when it is fresh in developers minds, so that there is not unplanned work when it is time to release the story.

Resources

• Team Working Agreement
• Definition of Ready & Done Templates