Definition of Done

Definitions

An explicit, shared checklist a team agrees an increment must satisfy before it can be called complete. Typical entries include code reviewed and merged, tests written and passing, documentation updated, deployed to a staging environment, and acceptance criteria verified. Its purpose is to eliminate the ambiguity in the word 'done', which otherwise means 'I stopped typing' to one person and 'running in production' to another, producing work that is repeatedly rediscovered as unfinished. The definition of done applies uniformly across all work, which distinguishes it from acceptance criteria, which are specific to one story. Teams commonly weaken it under deadline pressure by silently dropping entries, and the resulting gap between claimed and actual completion is a reliable source of hidden work.
In plain English: A team's agreed checklist of what 'done' actually means, preventing the '90% done for three weeks' problem.
Example: "Our definition of done: code reviewed, unit tests pass, integration tests pass, docs updated, deployed to staging, and demo'd to the PM."