What DoD Pitfalls Should Teams Avoid?
Avoid making the DoD hard to find, setting standards too low or unrealistically high, creating excessive administrative overhead, or imposing it without team buy-in. Such issues cause teams to disregard the DoD or find it irrelevant.
Metaphor
A DoD that’s buried, flimsy, or overengineered is like gym rules written in fine print at the bottom of a contract—nobody reads them, nobody follows them, and they don’t shape behavior. If the bar is set too low, too high, or without team agreement, it becomes either meaningless or impossible.
To be effective, the DoD needs to be visible, practical, and owned by the team so it guides real work instead of gathering dust.
When the DoD is ignored, hidden, or misapplied, it shifts from being a quality safeguard to a dysfunction that undermines transparency and feedback.
Works Consulted
In addition to any sources cited above, the following works informed my thinking: (1)