Ace the 2025 CSPO Challenge – Unleash Your Scrum Mastery!

The Definition of Done is a crucial artifact in Scrum that ensures all teams working on a product have a common understanding of what "done" means for their work. It is a clear and shared understanding, usually documented in a checklist format, that defines the criteria that must be met for a product increment to be considered complete. This includes aspects of quality assurance, testing, documentation, and any compliance requirements.

Having a well-defined Definition of Done is essential because it aligns all team members around the same expectations for completion, reducing ambiguity and improving collaboration. It ensures that every team understands the necessary steps to finalize their work, which promotes consistency across the product development.

While the other options—such as the Sprint Goal, Increment, and Sprint Backlog—are important to the Scrum process, they do not specifically provide a uniform standard of completeness across multiple teams. The Sprint Goal helps guide the team’s work during the sprint, the Increment represents the accumulated work completed at the end of a sprint, and the Sprint Backlog includes the planned work for the current sprint. However, none of these directly address the explicit criteria for what qualifies as "done" across different teams, making the Definition of Done the key artifact for shared understanding in Scrum.