Definition of Done - Agile Software Development

Key Takeaways

hi my name is chris gagne and i'm an agile coach today i will talk about the definition of done the definition of done is a documented team agreement it defines the conditions that must be met for potentially shippable product to be considered dumbest and done it's how we know that we did the thing right meaning we built in the correct level of quality into the product these are different from the acceptance criteria which are written by the product owner and help us know that we did the right thing creating and following the definition of done diligently can easily double the speed of an agile team lean practitioners will tell you that in the long run quality is free because if you don't build a quality product in the short run you're going to pay for it in the long run due to increased technical debt the slow pace of manual testing and production bugs having lots of hidden undone work in your product will make releasing your feature to customers difficult and risky scrum doesn't talk about this in much detail but many less mature teams use two sets to definition are done one is targeted at what you will consider done for a single product increment that you are bundling into a release the other is the definition of done for that entire release over time you want to improve your practices environment and team structure so that you can potentially release any given product increment at any time so what should you include in your definition of done well at a minimum you're going to want your work to be code complete unit integration and performance tested you want to have just enough documentation no new bugs or technical debt and lastly accepted by the product owner is meeting the acceptance criteria i suggest spending an hour as a team to review sample definitions of done and craft your own then review your definition of done periodically such as at your team's retrospectives at the beginning your definition of done may have just a few items and as your team and automation matures expand your definition of done to include more scope