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How can we tell when we’re done?

One of the key guidelines for an agile development team is that everyone agrees on what it means to say a particular task (typically a user story implementation) is “done”. I really like the definition given in InfoQ: Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams (via Jurgen Appelo)

So when a team member says that a story is Done and moves the story card into the Done column, a customer could run into the room at that moment and say “Great Lets go live now”, and nobody in the team will say “no, but wait”.

The rest of the article is a good model of how to manage branches in a medium-complex development environment; well worth the read for anyone working in a group.

One Comment

  1. We found that it’s not actually done until the user runs it from their own desktop, and says, yes, that’s what I wanted. We definitely had times when watching the first live run we realized it would be better to tweak a couple things, and if it wasn’t yet the end of the iteration, it sure was nice to be able to re-release with a fix so they wouldn’t have to wait a whole week for another version.

    Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 4:33 am | Permalink

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  1. […] Irving Reid, a great quote from Henrik Kniberg about how to tell when you’re done: So when a team member […]

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