When a new feature is close to a deadline, and you ask the question: “how are we doing?” There are three levels of done you can get:

  1. The developer’s done: it means the feature is code completed, but potentially untested, and likely with some bugs.
  2. The QA engineer’s done: the feature was tested, but it needs the user’s feedback, and there is a chance that won’t work as expected in the production environment.
  3. The user’s done: this never truly happens. The user might be happy with the new feature, but if the user is committed enough to the product, she will provide some good feedback about making it better.

If you really wanna know if the feature will be on time, you should aim for the QA engineer’s done. If you don’t have a QA engineer in your team, the second best guess is the developer’s done.

Leo Celis