Best practice to mark a story as "specified"?

Question

In our project the product owner has to fill the backlog with stories, which will be taken by the developers and planned for sprints.

The developers want to be sure they plan only fully specified stories and the product owner wants to be sure he marks each story that is ready as "specified".

Which is the best practice to do this? Should I

a: use the "Resolution" field to include a "specified" value or

b: include a new "status" field into the story definition or

c: should I define a specification board in addition to my board with a workflow like "to do -> in progress -> specified"

d: or is there another best practice for solving this problem?

Anar Chipur · Answer

Thank you @Deepanshu Natani !

I actually want that the product owner team to know which stories are "specified" and are ready for sprint planning. So they need to mark the stories as "draft" and "specified".

How can I use the status field to mark a story a story? As far as I know I have to define this status in my workflow first... Is this correct..?

However, I do not want to have this status in my sprint board, I just want that it is visible for the product owner team working in the backlog...

So, do I need to define the statuses "draft" and "specified" in my workflow in order to set the "status" field?

Deepanshu Natani · Answer

Hi @Anar Chipur ,

It actually depends on you, which of the above solutions work best for you.

All the above 3 solutions described by you can fulfill the need.

However, creating a new board will bring more effort for the entire team as compared to the other two options.

In my organization we have a similar workflow and we use the "status" field to mark the story as "specified". We haven't faced any issues till now.

So you can go ahead with the Status field :-)