What is the definition of done?
The definition of done (DoD) is the team's shared checklist that says when a ticket is genuinely finished. It's not the acceptance criteria of a single ticket — it's the standard every ticket has to meet.
A typical definition of done
- Code written and committed
- Unit tests added and passing
- Code review approved
- Acceptance criteria met (verified by PM or QA)
- Deployed to staging (or production behind a feature flag)
- Documentation updated where relevant
- Telemetry / logging in place if it's a user-facing flow
Each team writes their own. The first version is usually too long; iterate.
Why it matters
- No "done done" — eliminates the "I finished the code, the rest is your problem" handoff.
- Sprint health — only tickets meeting DoD count toward velocity. Forces honest counting.
- Code-review predictability — every PR is reviewed against the same bar.
Common definition-of-done mistakes
- Aspirational — listing things the team never actually does. Write the DoD you'll enforce.
- Set once, forgotten — revisit it every quarter as the product matures.
- Mistaken for acceptance criteria — DoD is the global bar; acceptance criteria are per-ticket.
- Skipped under deadline pressure — "we'll add tests later" is how technical debt happens.