The Definition of Done

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.

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".