Coach’s Corner

Do you have a definition of done that your whole Scrum team and their stakeholders understand? If not, use the exercise we discussed in this chapter to get your first definition captured and posted for everyone to see.

If you do have a definition of done, when was the last time you reviewed it during your sprint retrospective? Whether it’s been one sprint or ten since you’ve inspected and adapted your definition of done, use your next retrospective to start a conversation around the development team’s commitment to quality, and use that time to make sure the current definition of done supports that commitment.

As the Scrum master, you’ll need to do a lot of facilitating during this discussion. The team will have limiting beliefs about what they’re capable of doing. They’ll have even deeper beliefs about what they’re allowed to do. Openness and respect are crucial to this conversation. There might be development practices you need to implement, like continuous integration, continuous delivery, test-driven development, and automated testing.

The development team members own how they do their work. The definition of done reflects that ownership. During the next sprint review meeting, take some time to present the definition of done to your stakeholders. Show them that quality is important. This could make future trade-off discussions go more smoothly.

If there are impediments to delivering a high-quality product increment that the team can’t solve on its own, raise those issues to management right away. You’ll want to get an impediment list going, and plan out how to get those impediments resolved as quickly as possible.

In this chapter, we explored the importance of developing potentially shippable “done” increments. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss the sprint review, where the Scrum team meets with the product stakeholders to inspect the product increment and discuss budgets, forecasts, release, and updates that could impact the vision and direction of the product. The importance of the definition of done and the transparency it brings will be front and center in this discussion.