Definition of Done (DoD)
The Definition of Done (DoD) is a list of objective criteria, agreed on upfront by the team, that a feature must meet to be considered truly finished. It typically covers code review, passing tests, updated documentation, staging deployment, and product validation.
The DoD acts as a safety net during sprints: it stops a developer from marking a task complete when tests are missing or the code hasn't been reviewed. On a project with several developers and a product owner, it applies to every ticket before it moves to the "done" column. Without it, two people on the same team can have different ideas of what "finished" means, and that gap usually surfaces too late, during a demo or in production.
A common mistake is writing the DoD at project kickoff and never revisiting it. A better practice is to review it during retrospectives and adjust it if it's causing too much friction, or if bugs keep slipping through despite it. Another frequent confusion is mixing up the DoD, which covers general technical quality, with acceptance criteria, which cover the expected functional behavior of one specific feature.
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