Definition of Done: The Two-Sentence Document Most Teams Skip

Ask three people on a team what "done" means and you'll usually get three answers — code merged, code merged and tested, code merged and tested and deployed. That gap is where rework comes from, and it's almost always cheaper to close it with one written sentence than to keep absorbing the cost of reopening "finished" work.

"Done" is a team agreement, not an individual judgment call

Without a written definition, each person quietly applies their own standard, and the gap only becomes visible when someone is surprised — a task marked done that still needs tests, or a feature called shipped that was never actually deployed. A definition of done isn't documentation for its own sake; it's the thing that prevents that surprise from happening in the first place.

It should be short enough that everyone actually remembers it

A definition of done with twenty checkboxes becomes a checklist nobody reads, ironically the same failure mode it's meant to prevent. The useful version fits in two or three sentences — tested, reviewed, deployed to staging, whatever your team's actual non-negotiables are — short enough that people carry it in their head instead of needing to look it up.

One definition for the team, exceptions handled explicitly

Different types of work sometimes genuinely need different completion criteria — a spike doesn't need the same bar as a customer-facing feature. The fix isn't a separate definition of done for every task type, which recreates the original ambiguity at a smaller scale. It's one default definition, with explicit, visible exceptions called out per task when they apply, so the default stays meaningful.

Attach it to the board, not to a wiki page

A definition of done in a wiki page gets written once and referenced never — nobody re-reads documentation mid-sprint. Putting it somewhere visible on the board itself, where status gets changed, means the standard is in view at the exact moment someone is deciding whether to call something done, instead of living in a document that's already out of everyone's working memory.