Fixing Your Scrum

We Haven’t Defined “Done”

Many teams struggle to create a definition of done. Without such a definition, the team loses transparency into the product increment, and all sorts of problems can arise:

• The product owner won’t understand the level of completeness of each feature or how much time the team needs to release the features to customers.

• The development team will struggle to measure its velocity or progress within a sprint due to increasing technical debt and an incomplete understanding of what “done’’ means.

• The product backlog is likely incomplete because the Scrum team isn’t sharing and frequently reviewing testing requirements, nonfunctional requirements, and organizational standards.

• The development team won’t know how many product ...