Definition of Done (DOD)

Throughout his carreer, the knowledge worker will be assigned tasks. Some of them will be abandoned, tweaked, modified, deprecated, misunderstood, dropped... and a small amount will actually get done. Done? What is done? How do you define done? I see a lot of ambiguity in bug/task trackers; fix this, do that; more often then not tasks do not even contain a single verb.

Are you done?

For instance, in a project with continuous integration, when should a developer consider his bug fix as done? After he commits locally? Once pushed to the remote repository? Once tested in the QA environment? Once tested in the Staging environment? Once in Production? Once the client ran his acceptance tests and is happy?

Personal tale

A few days ago, I asked my wife to take care of the dish washing. To my surprise I came back home to see all the dishes laid out drying next to the sink. My wife and I do not have the same DOD (definition of done) for 'doing the dish washing'. To me, DOD of this task implicitly means: wash the dishes, then dry the dishes and finally store them in the cabinet. As for her, it means: wash the dishes and let the apartment air take care of the drying part. We'll store them later...

Conclusion

You now get the importance of the DOD (at work and at home). Upon asking someone to execute a task for you, if your request is not entirely clear, don't bother complain six months later your project is going down the sink.

Some posts regarding DOD :

- Definition of Done - A Reference

- Importance of DOD and DOR checklists

- A quick googling of "Definition of Done" should do the trick.