We all know (or i should hope to god that we all know) the ultimate “Done” is: Released, in production, and delivering business value to the customer.

 

Obviously, this isn’t always achievable so in scrum we create a mutually agreed “Definition of Done” between the team and the customer. This definition might be something like this:

 

User Acceptance tested

Installed on a QA environment

Documentation Completed

Coded to specifications

Coded to standards

Peer code reviewed

 

And so on (think about your own organization here)

 

Now, what I’d like to point out here is the variance between your definition of done and when you’re REALLY done (installed into a production environment and delivering value)

 

For example, what integration has to be done from QA to production? Is it a manual procedure? How many man hours will it take? What if you find something during that time that has to change? (That is risk because it can’t be estimated).

 

At one organization I am familiar with they merely have to copy the executables over into an IDENTICAL production environment. That amount of effort is very low and probably not prone to much risk (but there is some so we should measure it)

 

Let’s see how we can do something like this with an example user story and tasks.

 

Let’s say I have this user story:

Retail banking customer can see their savings account balance so they can decide if they have enough money to buy a new boat.

 

Ok, now let’s task that out to our “Definition of Done”

8 hours User Acceptance tested

2 hours Installed on a QA environment

3 hours Documentation Completed

12 hours Coded to specifications

3 hours refactored to standards

2 Peer code reviewed

 

OK, now let’s task out how much more it would take to put this story into PRODUCTION:

2 hours Create installer

3 hours create change control package

1 hours create web.config file for production

1 hours test web.config file for production

1 hour install the application

2 hours validate the application in the production environment (re-run regression UAT scripts)

 

So, that’s 10 hours of things that we are not going to do with this user story based on our ‘definition of done’ but they ARE contributing to our technical debt or our RISK.

 

So, let’s create a user story that represents this, give it a ‘size’ and put it on our backlog!