One standard, applied to everything
The Definition of Done is a single formal description of the state an increment must reach to be usable. It is not written per story. It says what is true of every piece of work the team calls finished — tests written and passing, code reviewed, merged to trunk, deployed to a staging environment, documentation updated, no new critical static-analysis findings. Because it applies uniformly, it is the thing that makes "done" mean the same thing in April as it did in January, and the same for the newest developer as for the tech lead.
Acceptance criteria are the other axis and candidates routinely blur them. Acceptance criteria answer "is this the right behaviour for this item" — the discount applies only above two hundred pounds, the export includes cancelled orders. The Definition of Done answers "is this built to the standard we ship at". An item can satisfy every acceptance criterion and still not be done because nobody wrote a test, and it can pass the Definition of Done while implementing the wrong rule.
| Scope | Owned by | Changes |
|---|
| Acceptance criteria | One backlog item | Product Owner, refined with Developers | Per item |
| Definition of Done | Every increment | Scrum Team, at or above the organisational standard | Rarely, deliberately |
| Sprint Goal | One Sprint | Scrum Team, crafted in Sprint Planning from the value the Product Owner proposes | Each Sprint |
Ownership, and the floor set from outside
The Developers must conform to the Definition of Done. If the organisation already has one — a regulated release checklist, a security gate, a shared platform standard — that is the minimum, and the team may add to it but may not weaken it. If the organisation has none, the Scrum Team creates it. The distinction matters in interviews because a candidate who says "the team decides what done means" and stops there sounds naive in any environment with audit or compliance obligations, while a candidate who says "the Scrum Master approves it" has misunderstood the accountability entirely.
What happens to work that misses it
Nothing partial is released and nothing partial is presented as complete. The item goes back to the Product Backlog, where the Product Owner reorders it against everything else that has since arrived. That last clause is the part people skip. Carryover is not automatically the top of the next Sprint; a week of new information may have made it less valuable than it looked, and treating it as pre-committed quietly removes the Product Owner's ability to change their mind.
You do not claim partial credit either. There is no eighty-per-cent-done column, and reporting one is how a burndown ends up flat until the final day and then collapses. Practically, the useful move when you spot the shortfall is to preserve as much finished work as possible: if a story covers three payment methods and one is complete and shippable, split it and let the finished slice be done rather than dragging all three into the next Sprint.
Why a weak Definition of Done stays invisible for months
This is where strong and adequate answers part company. A Definition of Done that omits something — no integration test, no deployment to a production-like environment, no accessibility check, sign-off deferred to a downstream team — does not make the team slower. It makes them look faster, immediately and measurably, because the omitted work is real work that is no longer being counted. Velocity goes up. Stakeholders are pleased.
The cost lands later as undone work: a hardening sprint before every release, a regression suite that nobody trusts, a release date that slips for reasons no burndown predicted. By then the shortfall has accumulated across dozens of items and cannot be attributed to any one of them. So the honest thing to say when you propose tightening the Definition of Done is that throughput will fall for a few Sprints and that the fall is not a regression — it is the previously hidden cost becoming visible. Say it before the drop happens, because saying it afterwards sounds like an excuse.
If "done" does not include everything needed to ship, the team is not delivering increments — it is accruing a debt with no interest schedule and no due date.
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