#5 Don't Pull Unrefined Tickets from the Backlog. (DoR matters)
🥨 Snack #5: When developers shouldn't show off their muscles
Category: Workplace Humor
What's your restaurant's DoR (Definition-of-Ready) for taking orders?
Here is my non-exhaustive checklist:
✅ User story is clear - can the team explain it in their own words? (or draw a comic about it)
✅ Acceptance criteria defined - what does “done” look like?
✅ Dependencies identified - do we need other teams/systems?
✅ Technical approach discussed - no surprises mid-sprint
✅ Estimated by the team - not by management alone
✅ Test strategy agreed - how will we verify it works?
✅ Design/mockups ready - if UI is involved
✅ Data requirements known - what goes in, what comes out?
What happens without DoR? You pull a “big fridge” from the backlog... then discover it won’t fit through the door, needs special power, and the customer actually wanted a freezer.
The real cost: Not the time spent moving the fridge. It’s the context switching, the blocked sprint, and the team’s trust in the backlog evaporating.
What's missing from this list? What's your team's biggest DoR fail?
🥨 What Are Snacks?
Snacks are my comic “shorts” - bite-sized, visual stories where tech meets real life.
Tech Tales: Daily struggles of a software architect.
Workplace Humor: The funny reality of the corporate world.
Life Bytes: Personal “snacks” from hilarious moments with my kids.
A bit of tech, a lot of humor - perfect for reading between two meetings.
Illustration credits: Comic scenes conceptualized by 8bytes! and rendered by Nano Banana.
Our biggest DoR fail? When the team says ‘we’ll figure it out later.’ We never do.