Agile Stance Series Part 7 - Definition of Done

This is part 7 of the series of post around Agile.

Definition of Done

During the Sprint Planning the team will be brought together to agree on a common definition of what it means for a task to be done/complete.

It is important for the team to come to an agreement of what done means to them. Remember, agile is around buy-in and not dictation. The team should discuss and decide together what equates to "done".

The outcome will be a list of checks (not to be confused with formal project acceptance criteria) that a task must pass.

Depending on the types of tasks, this might be a separate list for each team or for the different types of work package or more commonly, a single list for the entire team.

The list could include:

• code written
• code peer reviewed
• unit tests complete
• documentation complete
• integrated with code base
• other checks specific to the environment

This puts an emphasis on producing quality and the teams buy-in and commitment to the Sprint Goal.