What's your definition of done?

My personal definiton of done is that you can use it now, and you won’t ask me questions about it for at least a week.

For client projeccts, this means the interface is intuitive enough to be self expanatory (a rare case) or that documentation is included with the product. For server side pieces, it means backup and deployment solutions are in place so I can easily fix things should something break. In both cases, it means I’ve done enough personal QA and stress testing to know what I’m handing you is a robust piece of engineering.

The second part of the definition, the notion of a week without interruption, is important. It means that you as a customer have gone beyond the “Is the something I want?” cursory look at the product and are actively engaging with it on a day-to-day basis. It means I’ve gathered enough research and asked enough questions about what it is that you want, to be able to craft a solution that brings you joy.

In The Art of Agile, James Shore calls this state “done done”.

A story is only complete when on-site customers can use it as they intended. In addition to coding and testing, completed stories are designed, refactored, and integrated. The build script builds, installs, and migrates data for the story. Bugs have been identified and fixed (or formally accepted), and customers have reviewed the story and agree it’s complete.

In practice, I’ve found the process of solving a problem represents about 75% of the effort I put into getting something to done. But it only comprises 25% of the time it takes to get there. Going the rest of the way, writing the documentation, integrating customer feedback, working through the testing matrix, requires a lot more time and a lot less effort.

Looking back at my commit history for Mentat, it took me 3 days to get the game to a playable state, 4 to get it polished enough for the js13kGames competition, and a further 5 before I was comfortable calling it done. Most of the polish work was around cross browser compatability, code styling conventions, and fixing spelling mistakes in the documentation. None of that work stopped me from shipping, and I think that’s one of the reasons projects don’t make it to done.

Polish work doesn’t hold up the train.