Comparison
Definition of donevsGold plating
Definition of done
the ticket was moved to done and the monitoring, the docs and the flag cleanup were still outstanding.
The agreed, written list of what must be true before work counts as finished. Its purpose is to stop the invisible remainder — tests, observability, documentation, feature flag removal — from becoming a backlog nobody owns. It only works if it is short enough to be remembered and enforced at the moment of the claim, rather than being a wiki page from an onboarding two years ago.
Full entry →Gold plating
the ticket was done on Tuesday and you spent Thursday adding polish nobody asked for.
Continuing to add refinement past the point the requirement was met. It differs from over-engineering in motive: over-engineering is fear of the future, gold plating is craft or boredom aimed at something no user values. It shows up in delivery arguments because the cost is not the extra work but the schedule it silently consumed, which nobody agreed to spend.
Full entry →