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Definition of Done: Best Practice to Succeed in Software Projects

How do we know when a user story is "done?" Can we say that the user story is done when it is coded and all acceptance tests for it are passed? Business representatives may say yes, but they do not know all the peculiarities of software development. So, such criteria as quality are not fully visible to them. 

Or let’s have a look at another situation: a new feature that changed the business process was developed and tested according to the best software practices, but users struggle to use this feature because they are not sure about the changes this feature brings. Maybe a proper user manual or user training is needed in this case?

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Scrum Commitments: Tying Up Loose Ends and Shoehorning the Definition of Done

TL; DR: Scrum Commitments

While the new Scrum Guide is less prescriptive and more inclusive, it also ties up loose ends by including elements better, namely the previously free-floating Sprint Goal and the Definition of Done with the creation of Scrum commitments. This inclusion works remarkably well in the former’s case; regarding the latter, we need a shoehorn, though.

The Scrum Guide 2020

Foremost, the new Scrum Guide is less prescriptive, eliminating many suggestions such as the Daily Scrum questions, the need for at least one mandatory action item from the Retrospective becoming a part of the Sprint Backlog, or the advice on why Sprint cancelations are rare events.

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Definition of Done Canvas

UPDATED 11/2020:

This article and the DoD Canvas have been updated to reflect the Scrum Guide 2020. In the DoD Canvas, this includes removing the speech marks from the word Done and enriching some of the wording in the Benchmark section.

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If We’re Not Delivering Working Software, What’s the Point?

This is what it feels like when devs and their customers come together to make software that really works.

There's often a huge difference between working software and complete software.

In agile, nothing is ever really complete, and working software doesn't have to be fully finished to bring value to the end user.

A lot of time in agile, you're not going to complete a whole piece of functionality within a sprint. By incrementally delivering working software, end users have the ability to provide more regular feedback, which will allow the development team to make necessary changes without building unnecessary features and functionality.

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Scrum Guide Decomposition, Part 4

This is the fourth and final part of the Scrum Deconstruction.  You can find part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here. As mentioned previously, I did this as a method to help me understand the Scrum Guide better, and as part of my study for the Scrum.org's PSM I exam that I took back in October 2017. I have made updates based on the newest version of the Scrum Guide, November 2017.

Here I share in the hope that someone finds it useful.