» Definition of Done: A Hang-over from the Waterfall Era

Definition of Done: A Hang-over from the Waterfall Era

You might think Definition of Done (DoD) is a brilliant idea from the Agile world…but the dirty little secret is… its just a hand-over from the waterfall era.

While the DoD thought-process is helpful, it can lead to certain unwanted behavior in your team. For example:

DoD usually ends up being a measure of output, but rarely it focuses on outcome.
In some teams, I’ve seen it disrupt true collaboration and instead encourage more of a contractual and “cover my @ss” mentality.
DoD creates a false-sense/illusion of doneness. Unless you have real data showing users actually benefiting and using the feature/story, how can we say its done?
I’ve also seen teams gold-plating stuff in the name of DoD. DoD encourages a all-or-nothing approach. Teams are forced to build fully sophisticated features/stories. We might not even be sure if those features/stories are really required or not.
It get harder to practice iterative & incremental approach to develop features. DoD does not encourage experimenting with different sophistication levels of a feature.

I would much rather prefer the team members to truly collaborate on an-ongoing basis. Build features in an iterative and incremental fashion. Strongly focus on Simplicity (maximizing the amount of work NOT done.) IME Continuous Deployment is a great practice to drive some of this behavior.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2012 at 3:24 AM and is filed under Agile, Organizational. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Bob Schatz

Hi Naresh,

I can’t say I agree with this comment on the Definition of Done. Sounds more like just an unfortunate misuse (or abuse) of the Definition of Done. It shouldn’t stifle a team or disrupt collaboration. I’d be interested in reviewing a DoD that you’ve seen produce these results.

Bob Schatz
Agile Infusion LLC
http://blogs.agilefaqs.com Naresh Jain

Bob, I’ve only seen DoD misused. Would love to see some good (correct) examples you might have. That would really help us all.
Gooberholtzer

I like this. My overall reaction though is that the core problem is more in the culture of a place than in DoD causing the items you describe. I think when a culture really doesn’t value collaboration (doesn’t really believe that best furthers the cause of the company) then there are all kinds of misuses of Agile terms/activities. So, I wonder when you have found the above to be true if it really isn’t something more generally lacking in the culture. Thoughts?
- http://blogs.agilefaqs.com Naresh Jain
  
  While culture can contribute, certain practices can drive people’s behavior in the wrong direction.
  
  I’ve seen teams which used to collaborate quite well. And then in the name of process improvement they introduced DoD. Gradually the informal, spontaneous collaboration turned into structured meetings with written mini-contracts which turned into a ceremony. Eventually leading to blame-game, us vs. them and other bad patterns.
  
  After removing DoD, teams embraced more informal, spontaneous collaboration. Since we did not have a formal, written thing, people talked to each other and clarified things more often. Leading to more collaboration and better collective ownership.
  
  This is a pattern I’ve seen in several places over the years.