You've just completed a story, ready to tackle the next challenge. But soon, it's back on your desk—QA found an issue, or product needs a change made.
It's a frustrating loop that interrupts your flow, pulling you back to tasks you thought were done. This cycle of handing off tasks only to see them return for fixes is what we call "throwing work over the wall."
Stop "Throwing Work Over the Wall"
It's not uncommon for developers to finish writing the code for a story, hand off the rest to QA and product teams, and immediately jump to the next chunk of work.
But, this habit of moving on without providing a handoff to the next person does more harm than good. It disrupts workflows, creates bottlenecks, and, most critically, reduces the quality of the final product.
It also makes your life more difficult.
When you do not ensure your work is complete and ready to be handed off, it usually results in errors and misunderstandings that demand more time to fix since you have to context switch.
This means you can't hope to become a 10x developer, take on more work, and lead teams because you are spending your time cleaning up work that should have already been done.
How to Make Sure Your Work is Complete
A user story goes through several critical stages: planning, development, deployment, and feedback. Here are a few ways you can ensure your work is complete at each stage:
- Planning: Define clear acceptance criteria with QA & product so everyone is on the same page with what is expected from the story.
- Development: Review the story acceptance criteria and description to ensure your code meets requirements and functions as expected.
- Deployment: Verify the feature behaves as expected on test environments & production after it is pushed live.
- Feedback: Analyze and share error rates, user engagement, and performance stats with the product and customer success teams to confirm the story's success.
By applying these targeted actions at each stage, you complete your work and ensure it delivers value to users, avoiding disjointed handoffs and enhancing overall quality.
Every user story deserves a proper ending—seeing it completed and thriving in production, delivering real value to the customer. Let's redefine what "complete" means in our work.
How do you ensure your work is complete, not just "done"? Let me know by replying to this email or on LinkedIn. I respond to every comment I get.