What is a Definition of Ready?

A Definition of Ready (DoR) is a team-agreed checklist of conditions a story must satisfy before development begins. Common criteria include having acceptance criteria written, being estimated, having no unresolved external dependencies, and having received UX sign-off.

In Storymate, your DoR is stored as free-text (which you write, generate, or extract) and then automatically parsed into discrete, enforceable rules. Each rule has a severity — Blocking (the story must pass) or Warning (shown as an advisory) — and appears as a checklist on each story card during the review workflow.

Org-level vs project-level DoR

You can define a DoR at two levels:

• Organisation level — set in Organisation Settings → Definition of Ready. Applies to every project that has not defined its own DoR. This is the right place for standards that apply across all your projects.
• Project level — set in Project Settings → Definition of Ready. Overrides the org-level DoR for that specific project. You can start from scratch, inherit and extend the org definition, or opt out entirely by leaving the project DoR empty.

Defining your DoR

There are four ways to create or update your DoR text. All four are available at both the org and project level.

Option 1 — Guided wizard

The wizard asks six questions about your team's practices and generates a tailored DoR in plain language, which is then parsed into rules automatically.

1. 1

   Open DoR settings and click "Configure with wizard"

   In org or project settings, navigate to the Definition of Ready section and choose the wizard option.

2. 2

   Answer six questions

   The wizard walks through: methodology (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe…), estimation style (Fibonacci, T-shirt, hours, none), UX/design sign-off requirement, acceptance criteria format (Gherkin, checklist, prose…), external dependency identification, and optional domain context. All questions have sensible defaults — you can skip any one you want.

3. 3

   Review and save the generated DoR

   Storymate generates a DoR text from your answers. You can edit it before saving. Saving triggers automatic rule derivation.

Option 2 — Write manually

Paste or type your own DoR text directly into the text area. Click Improve with AI to have the AI refine the phrasing, fill in gaps, and structure it more clearly without changing your intent. The "Improve with AI" action is also available on the feature's DoR issues panel, letting you refine findings per feature. Then save to trigger rule derivation.

Option 3 — Extract from a URL

Paste the URL of any web page or Confluence page that contains your team's DoR or working agreements. Storymate fetches the page and extracts the relevant criteria automatically. This is useful if your DoR is already documented in your wiki.

Option 4 — Extract from an uploaded document

Upload a PDF, Word document, or Markdown file. The AI scans the document and extracts any DoR-related content. Useful for teams whose readiness criteria are embedded in longer process documents.

Reviewing and editing derived rules

After saving a DoR text, Storymate parses it into individual rules. Each rule represents one verifiable condition extracted from the text (for example, "HAS_ACCEPTANCE_CRITERIA" or "HAS_STORY_POINTS").

You can view and edit rules in DoR Settings → Rules:

• Toggle a rule on or off — disabled rules are ignored during validation.
• Set severity to Blocking or Warning. Blocking rules prevent a story from being marked compliant; Warning rules appear as advisory indicators only.

DoR in the review workflow

Once a DoR is configured, every story card in the review view shows a readiness indicator. Clicking the indicator expands a checklist of all active rules with pass/fail status for that story. Stories that fail at least one Blocking rule display a warning badge to signal they are not sprint-ready.

The DoR check is advisory — you can still approve a story that fails rules if your team decides to override. The check is designed to surface omissions early, not to block the workflow entirely.

Per-feature DoR suppression

From the overflow menu on a feature detail page, you can choose Suppress DoR Findings. This hides DoR warnings for all stories in that feature — useful when the team has explicitly agreed on an exception (e.g., a spike story that cannot have acceptance criteria). Suppression is reversible at any time and is logged in the audit trail.

Cached validation

DoR validation results are cached by the feature description hash. If you edit a feature description without changing its content, the cached validation results are reused — avoiding unnecessary re-computation. The cache is automatically invalidated when the description changes.

DoR in the project setup wizard

When creating a new project using the project setup wizard, step 5 lets you configure the project's DoR inline. You can run the guided wizard, write your DoR manually, or choose to use the org-level DoR. The project DoR can always be changed later in Project Settings.