Agile Software Development

Definition of done is one of the central concepts of Scrum process. Every iteration the team is supposed to release an increment of software that is fully done. Ideal Scrum team every iteration delivers software right to the customer hands, manages to arrange the trainings, print documentation and so on. Most of the real world teams, however, aim at somewhat smaller goals. What exactly is expected to be delivered by the iteration end depends on the team's definition of done.

Evolution of Done

Agile teams try to avoid the over-detalization of the customer requirements. In many cases the initial requirements are specified as loosely as in one sentence. In order to keep focus on the real customer demand (and not on what dialogs he'd like to see) the feature requests are often expressed in a form of "As a , I want [so that ]". For example, "As a network administrator, I want to monitor the most active nodes of the system so that I was able to easily balance the load". This form of requirement works very well until you start to work on it. It allows for capturing the original user need, while delaying the implementation specifics as long as possible, so that the team was able to work on it with as much information as possible.

Some teams using Scrum and XP tend to have special Q&A iterations every several iterations and/or before the release. While it might be ok, during the transition to the agile processes, as a rule of thumb having Q&A sprints is a good indication of the problems with the definition of "done". The main point of iterative development is to have a "potentially shippable" product at the end of iteration. Planning for Q&A sprints essentially means that at the end of the iteration, team does not plan to have a potentially shippable product.

During the last Agile SW Development Practices Seminar in Vantaa the participants shared a set of stories about how the switching to the agile development methods proceeded in their companies. A reasonable amount stories included a mention about that without the agreed definition of "done", nothing was completely done.

Own experience

Few weeks ago, when starting a new project, our team decided to try figuring out what our 'done' means. It was a total surprise to discover that within a small and rather coherent team of five persons we had three different points of view.