Scrum in the wild, deciding on Definition of Done

For those of you who would like to read this article imagining David Attenborough is narrating it, I’ll start the first few paragraphs as such.

‘The plains of the large corporation are both harsh and bountiful for the newly formed scrum team, and today we will be exploring their world in a little more detail.’

‘The team, in this case, is a little older, a combination of a few foreigners and some local talent, all brought together for their particular skillsets.’

‘Their mission, as set out by some strange system of external ‘product’ themes is set out for them, and they need to work together on a daily basis to ‘make it happen’.’

Okay, back to reality, now that we have a background let’s discuss some ideas and practicalities that we as a team have had to unpack and deal with over the last year. The evidence noted here are my own observations, and no feelings were intentionally hurt in the writing of this article.

Early on in our journey our scrum master introduced and insisted on the concept of ‘Definition Of Done’, which to most of us was an interesting idea, but never had to really materialise as long as we had the current way of working in place, e.g we would dev and QA and some other team/process will deploy to staging and Prod..