{"head":{"title":"What Is the Definition of Done (DoD)? | OceanLab","description":"The definition of done is the quality bar every piece of work must pass before it counts as finished. What goes in one, an example and common mistakes.","canonical":"https://oceanlab.in/glossary/definition-of-done"},"crumbs":[{"name":"Home","path":"/"},{"name":"Glossary","path":"/glossary"},{"name":"definition of done","path":"/glossary/definition-of-done"}],"slug":"definition-of-done","term":"Definition of done (DoD)","aka":["DoD"],"category":"Running a build","short":"The shared checklist every piece of work must pass, such as tested, reviewed and deployed, before the team calls it finished.","body":[["The Scrum Guide describes the definition of done as a formal description of the state of the work when it meets the quality measures required for the product. It applies to every item, unlike ",{"href":"/glossary/acceptance-criteria","text":"acceptance criteria"},", which are specific to one feature."],["A typical one says: code reviewed by a second engineer, automated tests written and passing, works on the agreed browsers and devices, no new accessibility errors, documentation updated, and deployed to a staging environment."]],"why":["Without a shared bar, \"done\" means \"works on my machine\". Unfinished testing and review then pile up as hidden work, which turns into ",{"href":"/glossary/technical-debt","text":"technical debt"}," and late surprises. A clear definition also makes ",{"href":"/glossary/velocity","text":"velocity"}," honest, because only finished work is counted."],"example":["A team marks a payments feature done because the code is merged. Their definition of done also requires a test against the payment provider's sandbox. Running it finds that refunds fail for one currency, two weeks before launch instead of after."],"inBuild":["A definition of done is agreed at the start of a build, next to the first milestone, so that \"finished\" means the same thing to the client and to the engineers for the whole project."],"mistakes":[["Writing it once and never enforcing it when deadlines get close."],["Making it so long that no item can pass, so the team quietly ignores it."],["Confusing it with acceptance criteria. One is the quality bar, the other is what this feature must do."]],"related":[{"href":"/glossary/acceptance-criteria","label":"Acceptance criteria","detail":"The testable conditions a feature must meet before the person who asked for it accepts it as done."},{"href":"/glossary/sprint","label":"Sprint","detail":"A fixed time box, one month or less and often two weeks, in which a team builds and shows a working piece of the product."},{"href":"/glossary/velocity","label":"Velocity","detail":"The amount of finished work a team completes in a sprint, used to forecast how much fits in the time left."},{"href":"/glossary/technical-debt","label":"Technical debt","detail":"The future cost of shortcuts taken in code today."}],"tools":[],"links":[{"href":"/software","label":"Software by industry","detail":"Systems we build per industry, with guides and tools."},{"href":"/embedded-engineers","label":"Embedded engineers","detail":"OceanLab engineers working inside your team."}],"sources":[{"title":"The Scrum Guide (Schwaber and Sutherland, 2020)","url":"https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html","checkedAt":"2026-10-25"}],"legal":false,"updatedAt":"2026-10-25"}