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Definition of Done - who can change it?

Last post 11:54 am January 29, 2020 by Harshal Rathee
7 replies
12:07 am December 22, 2018

Have a situation where PO and Dev team have decided to change definition of done by removing UAT in workflow, which they feel as unneccessary. I do feel that this may impact quality.

As a Scrum Master, do agree since the majority of the Scrum Team want this removed? In Scrum how do teams come to a decision?

 


04:24 pm December 24, 2018

Is there any evidence that UAT provides value, such as by identifying defects and quality problems before work enters production?

If so, why do the team wish to eschew UAT now? Have they found a way to build quality into their workflow, such that defects have fallen, UAT no longer serves any purpose, and has become wasteful and redundant? 


04:29 am December 26, 2018

Definition of done can be changed by scrum team after Sprint Planning or Sprint Retrospective meeting. Team comes together and decides work-flow in order to improve the quality. UAT is for actual software users to come up with their feedback. How can team produce quality product without having UAT? Are they doing it to save some more time for development/testing etc? As a scrum master, you need to ask these questions to team.


02:56 pm December 26, 2018

Have a situation where PO and Dev team have decided to change definition of done by removing UAT in workflow, which they feel as unnecessary . I do feel that this may impact quality.

There are some client projects setup in a way that client does the UAT. I'm not sure what is the situation for you guys but in the end the PBI should be releasable.

The heart of Scrum is a Sprint, a time-box of one month or less during which a "Done", useable, and potentially releasable product Increment is created - Scrum Guide

Whether you call it SIT, UAT, unit testing, manual testing, penetration testing, performance testing or whatever, the core principle is mentioned above. So ask the team if it can be useable and potentially releasable? without any further testing. If the answer is no, they accruing Technical debt in the form of untested,non useable product increment and and are calling it as done thus providing fake progress. Your team will end up with unplanned work (from missed functionality, bugs and bad code) putting your entire product and project at jeopardy pretty soon !


02:59 pm December 26, 2018

Also you mentioned they removed from workflow. This does not necessarily mean they are not testing it. This could also mean  they are simplifying their workflow as they already agree that testing needs to be done before they move an item from inprogress to done. I personally urge my teams to make it as a task/checklist item under the PBI as it needs to be done before calling it as done anyways. If the team can talk to each other and track the testing part as part of the PBI itself (as a task , etc) what's the point of adding a workflow event and add complexity to the process?


07:24 am January 28, 2020

No you can not change dod.


09:11 pm January 28, 2020

Shivangi, that is not a correct statement according to the Scrum Guide.


11:54 am January 29, 2020

No you can not change dod.

Lets put it other way , What do you think can happen if we change it ? 


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