Definition of Done from Academy to the Industry: An Exploratory Survey

On the benefits and problems related to using Definition of Done — A survey study

“…We identify an opportunity for more fine-grained research on why the problems appear, what we can do to prevent them, and how to solve them. Also, the results of the survey complement the previous studies on investigating how the practice of DoD is applied and what DoD items are, e.g., [5], [18]. The respondents reported that there are multiple ways of creating and maintaining DoDs.…”

“…Step 2: Categorization-the first author assigned the category proposed by Silva et. al in [5] and [18] to each DoD item. The second author went through the assigned items and verified the correctness of assignment.…”

“…Finally, based on the analysis of gaps in the literature regarding DoD, they concluded that "there is a need for more and better empirical studies documenting and evaluating the use of the DoD in agile software development." In their follow-up study, Silva et al [18] conducted a survey on a sample of 20 respondents. The study provided some insights on how DoD is created and maintained, e.g., they learned that 80% of respondents had their DoDs explicitly documented, the DoDs were mostly created by the team and evolved throughout the project.…”

“…24 respondents shared with us their DoDs, which in total had 143 DoD items. To better understand [5] and [18]. We noticed that we had to extend the proposal by adding one more category, namely AC check, which would be used to group the items that concern the fulfillment of acceptance criteria.…”

“…While the notations of user stories or use cases are frequently used to document software requirements [17], there is no common format in which DoD items are specified. Frequently, DoD items are short statements or short sentences such as those presented in Figure 1 or mentioned in the work of Silva et al [18].…”