

In order for the team to be able to do that, the artifacts need to be truly transparent. Namely, by inspecting the state of Scrum Artifacts, the team can make informed decisions to best optimize the value and reduce the risks involved in developing a product of any kind. While there are many reasons as to why Scrum employs artifacts as one of its very few defined categories, the main purpose of Scrum artifacts is to make the work transparent for the Scrum Team and other stakeholders. It is a common practice for Scrum Teams to add to their Definition of Done as time goes on, as the Team becomes better and as it discovers additional criteria that will increase the value of Increments and the product as a whole. It is up to the Product Owner to decide whether it will actually be released. Whereas the Scrum Guide does not prescribe what should be included in the Definition of Done and leaves this to the Scrum Team, it does say that the increment should only be considered “Done” if it is useable and potentially releasable. Namely, this shared understanding of when a Product Backlog item is truly “Done” better informs the team on how much work they can pull into a Sprint. The Definition of Done is also a useful tool that can help the team during the Sprint Planning meeting. For some Teams, the Definition of Done will entail different types of testing, while others may add certain regulatory requirements that have to be passed for the items and increments to be done. The Definition of Done is established by the Scrum Team as a unit and it can include anything and everything that the Team believes to be pertinent. This category is introduced to put emphasis on the Scrum Team’s collective understanding of what it means for a Product Backlog item or Increment to be done. The Definition of Done in Scrum is applied to Product Backlog items that are being worked on as part of a Sprint and to the Increment at the end of the Sprint. It is essential to understand that “Done” in Scrum is a specific concept which is introduced as the Definition of Done.Īdd value to your product with VivifyScrum The increment definition also adds that the increment has to be “Done” at the end of the Sprint. In essence, the second part of the definition simply points out that new functionalities or features should build on the stuff that already brings value to the product and that they should in no way jeopardize the functioning of the product as a whole. has a very interesting discussion about this on their forum. For some people, this differs too much from the traditional definition of the word increment.

The reason for this is the second part of the definition that introduces the value added by previous increments. While it seems like a simple enough definition, it still causes some confusion. The Increment is defined as a sum of the Product Backlog items that were completed within a single Sprint and the value of that was added to the product in previous Sprints. In addition to this, we will also examine the importance of artifact transparency in Scrum and the Definition of Done. In this article, we will be looking at the Scrum artifact which gets only a few sentences in the Scrum Guide and which is often misunderstood - the Increment.
#Artifact meaning series
In our series of articles on Scrum artifacts, we have already covered the Product Backlog and the Sprint Backlog.
