Comparison
Definition of donevsShift left
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 →Shift left
the security review happened while the design was still a document instead of the week before launch.
Moving a check earlier in the process, where fixing what it finds is cheap. It applies to testing, security, accessibility, performance and compliance, and the economics are the same in each case: the cost of a change rises with how much has been built on top of it. It becomes a slogan rather than a practice when the earlier check is added without removing the later one or giving the team the ability to act on it.
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