Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Expand “Done!” Criteria

Iteration “Done!” criteria should be used as a vehicle to prevent the buildup of project waste. Putting it another way, expand “Done!” criteria to foster debt intolerance. As teams progress through a project and discover that there are particular kinds of project debt building up, they should consider adding those additional items to your “Done!” criteria to prevent any further accumulation of those particular kinds of debt.

For example, say that teams notice that they are falling behind in maintaining the expected levels of security enforcement in the code. In this case, they should add security enforcement to their “Done!” criteria. Teams may resist this because they think it is slowing them down. But, as they build ...