Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Definition of Done

Dear agile team, Don't let anything that's not DONE into your production.

In this practical and dirty world of software development, many roles work together on a user story and do their tasks to complete the user story. For a role, when s/he finishes his tasks, s/he might think that s/he is done. But we need some tool which will help the team and the product owner to get the confidence that a user story is really "Done" Done. With different members doing work that is "finished" at different times, how can the team and the Product Owner, know when a story has truly been completed?

Definition of Done (we will call it DOD henceforth) gives a confidence to the team and product owner that the story is done and can be released to production any time. Definition of Done is a list of things that must be finished before the work/story is accepted by the Product Owner. Merely testing the acceptance criteria can not ensure that the story is done. Acceptance Criteria is just a part of DOD. DOD also has lot of other things like -