During a big Scrum implementation I was asked by my customer, how I want to define the Level of Done! First I did not understand the question, but then it became obvious. Do we need a standard Level of Done for the whole organization. My first reaction was no, but then I realized that it makes complete sense.

A company or department defines the Level of Done that it wants to have applied to all deliveries of each team of this organization. This should be very general and more on guideline level. F.e. we want that all functionality has been user acceptance tested.

The team members have to define with their Product Owner the Level of Done on their team level. We can only deliver on our development hardware.

During the Sprint Planning 1 we might need to add a story specific Level of Done that is only valid for this specific story. We accept this story only if it is tested with data of this specific user base.

I like this distinction of three Levels of Done. It makes perfectly sense to me. It is intuitive and you can easily apply this.

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