I am now on my fifth version of “The Definition of Done” at work—or is it the millionth? Much like the turtles in Ringworld, sometimes it feels like it is “Done” all the way down.
If you are early enough in a company’s existence, you will eventually find yourself here. You will sit in a room full of people who are all squawking like parrots. Half will be going, “Is it done? Is it done?” and the other half will be going, “It is done! It is done!”
And sometimes, in fact, the work is actually done.
The sad truth is that it might not even be the majority.
It begs the question: Who is responsible for saying something is done?
And why does that matter?
Oh, dear reader, I am sitting here and staring at my notes through blurry eyes, fighting back the tears as best as I can.
What happens when you say something is done when it is not? I want to ask the ChatGPT to rewrite my thoughts as if I were HP Lovecraft and the business processes are cast here in the role of He-Who-Is-Not-To-Be-Named. You will lose your sanity if you say the work is done three times! How else to capture the horror of shipping software that is not done?
Half of you are rolling your eyes now. Declaring something done cannot be that hard, can it?
But what does it mean to be done?
Developer Done
This is always the slipperiest. From all of the “it works on my machine” memes to 8.5 million machines dying on Crowdstrike Friday, see the news if you do not get the joke. Most organizations default to Developer Done as some sort of holy declaration that is hard to prove true and eventually hard to believe. While making sure that lots of stuff is committed to the repo and put into PR after it has been tested by the original developer, this is the most dangerous of all of the Dones to me.
Quality Assurance Done
Here is our second flavor of done. Someone produced a checklist or test suite to ensure basic functionality works. A script or a worker-bee has driven through this checklist, and everything has a little green tick mark or a little yellow question mark. The question marks are annotated as “pass with notes” in some suspicious-looking document that The Stakeholders scrutinize. There are holes here too. You can have something that is defect-free and yet, not done.
Product Manager Done
Done version three is another layer, like some sort of business onion. Your developers can be done, and your testing can be done, but does it do what the product owner envisions? There is some Marcus-Aurelius-level thinking that goes into this, and we can ask ourselves about the nature of the thing. This gets us pretty close to “ackshully” done if you ask me.
Contractual Obligations Done
A fourth and equally interesting flavor of done is the Contractual Obligations Done. Is this a layer of business onion? This may be where the onion theory falls apart. It is too bad, I would have loved a side of business onion with lunch today. This is a tricky one because if you are going through a legal checklist of stuff to declare it done, you might find that you are technically done, and yet, you miss out on the next and most important kind of done.
Customer Done
This is a pretty important flavor of done. When you have built your software Macguffin, does it indeed Macguff sufficiently? Do customers smile, and do onlookers exhibit symptoms of surprise and delight?
There are many definitions of done, and none of them are correct in their entirety. It is important that everyone involved can sufficiently proclaim something done for us to have a true enough done for any particular piece of software. If we do not have sufficient rigor to reach the right level of consensus on done, then we will falsely declare something as done.
Falsely declaring something as done is dangerous. Even more frightening to the shareholders, falsely declaring something as done is expensive. A plethora of companies will attempt to help you get there from here at two to eleven dollars a month per active employee, and you can email them to ask for enterprise discounts.
Phew, I am spent. I hereby declare this blog post as done.
Wait, not yet.
First, I must implore you to Socials about this—TokTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I still have fifteen unspent minutes of fame directly resulting from you doing nothing every time you come here.
See you all next week!
