ever-works/orgs/definition-of-done

Definition of Done

One shared checklist so "done" means the same thing to the person who built it, the person who reviewed it, and the person who ships it.

The checklist

A unit of work is done only when every line below is true or its exception is written down and accepted by the responsible owner:

1. Criteria met — every acceptance criterion from the plan is demonstrated by a passing automated test or a recorded manual verification. Not "should work": shown working.
2. Tests first and green — new behavior arrived with tests that failed before the implementation existed; the full suite passes now, not just the new tests.
3. Reviewed — an independent reviewer approved this exact version. Changes made after approval void the approval.
4. QA exercised — the running change survived deliberate hostile testing, and every defect found is fixed or explicitly accepted with a written reason.
5. Scope honest — everything promised is present; everything cut is listed as cut, with the requester's awareness, not silently dropped.
6. No debris — no leftover debug output, dead code, commented-out blocks, TODOs without owners, or temporary configuration riding along.
7. Docs current — anything a user or the next builder needs to know (changed behavior, new setup, new limits) is written where they will actually look.
8. Shippable — the artifact builds reproducibly from clean sources, and a rollback path exists and is written down.
9. Traceable — the change links back to its Task, and the Task links forward to the release that carries it.

How to run it

• Run the checklist top to bottom and record a verdict per line: pass, fail, or accepted-exception with the acceptor's name. No line may be skipped as "obviously fine".
• The checklist is binary at the end: all lines pass or the work is not done. "90 percent done" means not done.
• Whoever finds a gap routes it to the owner of that line — builder for tests, reviewer for approval, QA for verification, release for shippability — rather than fixing it out of lane.

Output format

A short done-report: the unit of work, the verdict per checklist line, the list of accepted exceptions with reasons and acceptors, and a final DONE or NOT DONE with the blocking lines named.