Social Contracts

In order for teams to work together, and team members to work together, social contracts must be created and agreed upon. These contracts help focus the conversations and establish expectations.

Working Agreement

The purpose of the Working Agreement 1 is to ensure the Agile Team shares responsibility in defining expectations for how they will function together and enhance their self-organization process. It creates an awareness of both positive (and negative) behaviors that can impact the Team and empowers the Scrum Master to keep them accountable.

The process of defining the Team’s working agreement is straightforward. The Scrum Master facilitates a session with the Agile Team and Product Owner, where they generate a number of team disciplines together. A working agreement should be recalled easily, so they will then vote on the top five to ten disciplines. Once the Team has agreed upon a set of disciplines, they should be posted in their designated area and/or stored in a virtual folder that is accessible to all members.

Definition of Ready

Having a Definition of Ready 1 means that stories must be immediately actionable. The Team must be able to determine what needs to be done and the amount of work required to complete the User Story or PBI.

"Ready" stories should be clear, concise, and most importantly, actionable.

These considerations are often summarized as the Invest Criteria 2, and they provide us with a useful Definition of Ready which can be applied to Product Backlog Items. By actively participating in Product Backlog refinement, a good Development Team will collaborate with the Product Owner in making sure that a standard such as this is observed.

I (Independent). The PBI should be self-contained and it should be possible to bring it into progress without a dependency upon another PBI or an external resource.

N (Negotiable). A good PBI should leave room for discussion regarding its optimal implementation.

V (Valuable). The value a PBI delivers to stakeholders should be clear.

E (Estimable). A PBI must have a size relative to other PBIs.

S (Small). PBIs should be small enough to estimate with reasonable accuracy and to plan into a time-box such as a Sprint.

T (Testable). Each PBI should have clear acceptance criteria which allow its satisfaction to be tested.

Definition of Done

"The Definition of Done is a formal description of the state of the Increment when it meets the quality measures required for the product."

In software, a Definition of Done 1 describes the tasks needed for every new functionality, regardless of size or request.



In a non-development context, the DoD is still a list of non-functional requirements that are required to be completed before work is considered complete.