How do we get to something that is both meaningful and valuable to the customer and the team?
In an attempt to spark deeper conversations that would not be limited to the day of this event only, Marcelo Lopez opens up by asking the audience what their thoughts are on the Definition of Done. Later, and in order to set the grounds for his talk, the coach talked about the existing models that allow the team to assess the readiness of their User Stories.
It came down to INVEST, a model designed to provide the teams with certain criteria to assess the quality of a user story and set the right expectations from the beginning. Here are the criteria that all User Stories must have to be ready:
“I” ndependent (of all others)
“N” egotiable (not a specific contract for features)
“V” aluable (or vertical)
“E” stimable (to a good approximation)
“S” mall (so as to fit within an iteration)
“T” estable (in principle, even if there isn’t a test for it yet)
If we have a model that serves as a guide to assess the quality of our User Story right off the start, then why not use the existing DoD models to better comprehend when a product is done.
Here are some of the assessment models for DoD:
Acceptance criteria (CA)
General Agreements (GA)
Team Norms: TN
SoC: Standard of Care
Due Diligence
Coach Marcelo discusses the different assessment models in this presentation not without alerting that different types of work require different types of criteria. This is why he came up with a model that included the above-mentioned models to ensure the Agile team could do the best work to the best of their abilities. In fact, Lopez says, with this model a Scrum Master can go to the Product Owner and Stakeholder and say “we built the right product, and we built it as best as we could”. In other words, this model was tested by him and his scrum teams to keep track of their progress toward “Done”.
Here’s his tested model used.
DoD = (AC + GA + TN + SoC) + DD
“It’s that all there is to doing work?”
This is the question that Coach Macelo asked repeatedly to the audience to poke their curiosity. How to make sure we are asking the right questions even though we have completed an item off the Acceptance Criteria. How to make sure we are not missing anything and how we can check, double check, and triple check the product built is a good one?
If you want to have a better understanding of the definition of Done and how to get there, check the full video of the event and don’t miss the audience interaction that made this meetup so rich and valuable.
Key topics:
To Get to Done, consider ready
Acceptance Criteria (AC) Done! Right?
Definition of Done (DoD) Model
Waterfall has many versions
Acceptance Criteria (AC) Standard of Satisfaction
General Agreements (GA)
Team Norms (TN)
Standard of Care- SoC
Due Diligence (DD)
Done Holistic Definition of Completeness
Not Done - The Frontier of Done
Un-Done- Before you go-go
Done- What “Scrum” Says
Done is not just a Scrum thing
Watch the full meeting here: