What does ‘done’ mean?

Here’s a problem that I’ve been thinking about recently. I’d love to hear feedback.
Scrum dictates that each user story that a team commits to in a sprint should be complete at the end of the sprint, and the story’s acceptance criteria define what ‘done’ means.
Certain types of enterprise testing can pose challenges to this principle. Performance requirements, for instance, are often based on scenarios that transcend individual user stories.
Here is an example: the application under test supports two different user roles, and the performance requirements stipulate the required performance of individual functions when certain numbers of users of both roles are using the application concurrently. User stories A, B and C cover functionality performed primarily by one user role and stories D, E, and F cover functionality used by another role.
If the team implemented stories A, B and C in one sprint, the team would not fully know whether stories A, B and C meet performance requirements until stories D, E and F are complete and the entire scenario is run with all user roles.
Certainly, the scrum team can minimize these sorts of problems by changing the order in which they implement stories or other strategies. And the team gains a certain amount of value from performing partial tests, but fundamentally, enterprise testing poses these types of challenges, and scrum teams have to deal with them.
If the scrum team cannot work around this sort of challenge, then they should consciously acknowledge the challenge, figure out a compromise to agile principles or scrum practices in order to deal with the challenge, and specify the risks involved in the compromise. And most importantly, all of this should be communicated to the customer at the sprint review.
Using the example above, a portion of the sprint review would go something like this:

Here’s the challenge we faced: in this sprint we completed stories A, B and C to the best of our ability, but we cannot fully know whether these stories fulfill all performance criteria until we complete stories D, E, and F.
Here’s the compromise we came to: we have completed these stories to the best of our ability. We did as much as we can, short of the full performance testing scenario, to verify that the stories meet performance acceptance criteria.
Here are the risks involved in this compromise: It’s possible that the stories do not perform as well as expected in an enterprise deployment. But since the missing variable pertains to unfinished functionality, users will not be executing that functionality at this time anyway.
Here’s how we plan to address this compromise: we plan to complete stories D, E and F in the next sprint. At that time, we’ll be able to run the entire performance scenario and verify that stories A, B and C meet performance requirements.

At that point, the customer would be able to accept or reject the stories. However, if the team has been working closely with the customer from the beginning of the process, the customer should have known about the challenges and have worked with the team on how to address them. The risks presented at sprint review should not come as a surprise to the customer.

One thought on “What does ‘done’ mean?”

  1. Imagine that we split the stories. A’ B’ C’ have to work. A”, B”, C” say what performance has to be.
    Then A’ B’ C’ can be done and A” B” C” scheduled IFF needed.
    Ne?

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