The Definition of Done
adi.bio
adi.bio
This article essentially wants perfection as a definition of “done.”
Part of my motivation for writing this was wondering what would be the solution to what I see as a lot of failed engineering careers of folks in 30s and 40s. I know a lot of them, genuinely great engineers - but somewhere down the line, their expectations of their life shifted, but what they did with their time did not - resulting in dissatisfaction.
Hence, a suggestion to focus on the objective value being created vs. individual engineering tasks as a better barometer of progress.
Not necessarily.
I see it as having dealt with all low-hanging fruit. Of handling anything reasonably expected at that point. Bugs will remain. Exploits will doubtless be found. But so long as all reasonable efforts were made to find and deal with them, that is good enough.
Because a perfect product will never be done.
And a done product cannot possibly ever be perfect.
Yes. I am done.
Is the story done? Of course. There is nothing else to do on that story because we broke things down into these minuscule story cards.
Is the feature done? Probably not. If you want to hold the “done” classification on the minuscule story until the roll-up of all the feature’s stories are “done“, merged, QA tested, deployed to staging, PM tested, deployed to users, and actually used … well, our “momentum” is gonna look terrible.
At some point I have to get this off my plate and move on. If you want this team’s engineers to babysit their stories until they land in users’ laps, that’s not gonna work. If you want all the stories to sit in operations’ hands until that point, you’re screwing their metrics.
Simply put: it ain’t that simple.
I don't get what the context behind this is? What's the intended goal of gatekeeping the word "done"?
For me, I normally come up into "is it done?" as a question when working on tickets in something like jira/trello/etc and there's some "done" column to move things to. Is "value in the world" useful for that context?
Like, "Oh yeah, Craig's finished implementing the API endpoints as per the spec, but we're leaving it in active until the front end team integrate it and it starts delivering real world value".
My aim was to encourage: - More precise language in engineering discussions - Greater accountability - Avoiding procrastination - Keeping your eye on the ball and not just on your PR getting merged
That's something that I've adopted as a personal mantra.
It doesn't just mean have all the proper boxes been ticked. It also means we're done adding stuff. Time to take out the 600-grit sandpaper, and start finish work.