Learning to think ahead with a "Readiness Board"

The "Readiness Board" is a Kanban-style grid on the wall which allows us to prepare features and flesh-out stories before they are accepted into a sprint.

Features come onto the board as high-level titles like "Build an admin app",  and leave the board as a piece of work that’s understood by the whole team, story pointed, with Technical Architect's sign-off, and with an idea of how the feature could be demo’d. A Work-in-Progress limitation of 2 stories helps us focus.

The benefit to this process is that our backlog pruning and sprint planning sessions go faster and more smoothly because the uncertainty has been removed from the stories and the technical approach is already agreed by the time the story reaches the sprint.

Each feature has a checklist on the card to indicate that the DEFINITION OF READY has been fulfilled.