How We Work (part 3)

In today’s edition of “How We Work,” I am going to talk about the Agile concept “Definition of Done.” What does it mean, “Definition of Done.” Well, it’s how you know you’re done. In software development, whatever you were assigned to do is supposed to do something at the end. Does the thing do what it was supposed to do? If yes, congratulations! You’re done! Does the thing do 78% of what it was supposed to do? Yes? Sorry…you are not done.

What does this mean at Black History Research Collective? One of our tasks this summer was to design a logo. Within about 2 weeks, I had a .jpg file from Amani in my hot little hands with the company name and a smooth graphic. Done! Easy-peasy.

“Definition of Done” means something entirely different when we’re deep in the newspaper archives doing historic research. For one thing, it’s history: there will always be more to uncover, therefore there is no “done.” Additionally, we don’t exactly know what we’re looking for, so it’s hard to say, “once you’ve found The Ultimate Perfect Fact, you will be done,” because I have no idea what that even means. Instead, we adopted a flexible approach, and implemented a “Done-ish” zone on our Trello board. Whether we’ve run out of steam or hit a brick wall with resources (surprisingly, we haven’t encountered this yet), we can declare ourselves “done-ish” when we feel the time is right.

The Ultimate “Done” for Black History Research Collective is to have researched and submitted a church for historic recognition. But first, we need a lot more information. Our work is not done, but this blog post is.