Definition of done

When you’re starting out with a new team, or just wanting to review your existing process it’s always worth making sure all the team understand what “done” actually means.

Is a work item done when the code is complete on the developers local machine or is it when it’s been tested and deployed to your QA environment? For some of you, done might mean when fully shipped to live.

My team define done as

• Feature from product backlog coded in entirety
• Code reviewed by another member of the team
• Functionality tested in QA (or System Test as we call it)
• Functionality tested as part of regression testing in QA

Then, and only then will it move into the done swimming lane of our sprint board and be included in the build for the next release to production. How about yours?

Is working Agile a bit like ground hog day?

At our last retrospective meeting, one of my developers hinted he wasn’t liking the routine. He said he felt like Bill Murray’s character in Ground Hog Day, where every morning he woke up and it was the same thing over and over again.

While this seems like a bit of an extreme comparison, there was an element of truth in what he said. While the framework of Agile dictates a certain amount of repetition, it also gives those involved the flexibility to work on different things each day, and decide as a team what’s most important.

The rest of the team disagreed, expressing they liked having less surprises and more structure to the working day / week. In my experience, this is the general consensus, but I’d be interested if anyone out there thinks differently.