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.
More recent blog on this: Done with Definition of Done or shoud I say Definition of Done Considered Harmful
