Defining Potentially Shippable
In the mid-1990s, it became popular for teams doing iterative and incremental development to set the target of periodically bringing the application to a “Zero Defect (ZD) milestone.” Jim McCarthy, former director of the Microsoft Visual C++ group, wrote and spoke often about ZD milestones.
Zero defects does not mean that the product does not have bugs, or missing functionality; it means that the product achieves the quality level that had been set for that milestone. The product is tested to that effect. The essential point of ZD milestones is that nobody makes the milestone until everybody does, and nobody leaves it until everybody does. This enables the team to discover what aspects of the project are in trouble. ...
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