Are We Done, Really Done or Really Really Done ?

This week, the first dry-run of the Professional Scrum Developer for Java course was given at Pyxis. For this occasion, 6 Pyxissians were on-site for 5 training days. Here is a sample of the many things we have learned.

One of the fundamental aspects that was covered was producing a proper “definition of done”(D.O.D).

For most of us, even with our extensive Scrum background, this was actually harder than we had originally expected. The training course consisted of 4 sprints spread over a 4 day period. At the end of each sprint, we had to demonstrate our accomplishments to the Product Owner.

At the end of the fourth sprint, we had to put our software into production.

Like most teams, we started out with a D.O.D that was too ambitious and wasn’t clear enough. For example :

• We had planned for 100% test coverage for all of our tests, yet it was impossible to demonstrate since we were unable to calculate code coverage for view tests. Even worse, there was simply no available tools to calculate our test coverage for these.
• We also had ambiguous elements, like following the code standard, without stating which one.

After achieving first sprint, we did what we thought were the proper modicifications to our done definition. As you can guess, we failed our second sprint. Our done definition was being seriously violated. We committed to too many tasks and did not take the time to truly understand all the work involved in achieving our done definition. We adjusted for the following sprints. Inspect and adapt as always.

However, when came the time to release the product, we realized that our done definition was seriously lacking. We had no confidence in being able to ship our product to the customer. The Product Owner was disappointed in learning this. We then had to modify our done definition to finally be able to deliver. Unfortunately, we had skipped some important steps in the previous sprints which accumulated up until the last day.

Here are few key points that were missing :

• Exploratory testing
• User Experience testing
• Proper production deployment procedure

This really helped us see how important it is to have a true definition of done and to follow it through sprint after aprint. After all, we had accumulated debts after only 4 days of sprinting. Imagine if we had been sprinting for weeks !

-Nicolas Henin and Nicholas Lemay