Love the title. Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

This is what user stories were supposed to accomplish in a more lightweight way.

The whole scrum DoR (definition of ready) status means that something is clear and ready for development.

Stories are written and are sent to the engineering team for clarification. This is where the comments are supposed to come in. There is a clear step for clarification of stories, before the story is ready for development. It gets marked as DoR when that clarification is done.

It does not matter if you use RFCs, user stories, or hallway conversations as your process of clarifying work. If it does not work, it does not work.

Any way you can get your teams to communicate more clearly is great.

> "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

Love this! Corollary: when you have too many meetings, that’s easy to notice. When you don’t have enough meetings, that’s harder to notice.

I’m in the process of carefully adding meetings and process to our small team of 6 (we had a PM from a large company drop in a few years ago and haphazardly add a bunch of process, and it didn’t really help).

We’re fully remote and have a daily huddle and, on average, 1 hour of meetings a week. It turns out this isn’t enough. So far, each bit of communication we’ve added has resulted in better outcomes and higher morale because we feel more like a team.