Potentially shippable product Increment is a minimum requirement for creating a done increment in scrum.
Product Increment is one of the important deliverables.Product Increment is the integration of all the completed items.Product Increment gets incremented in the subsequent sprints.In a sprint, the Product increment is the integration of all the completed list of Product Backlog items.Product increment increases with each sprint.
The Product Backlog items are shipped or transported at the end of each sprint.In Agile/ Scrum, Potential Shippable Product Increment is delivered in sprints, whereas in the waterfall model, it has to go through all the levels of the SDLC.
The product increment is ready for shipping by the end of each sprint.There is a difference between potential shippable and potential releasable.The Product is ready to be shipped by the end of the sprint, but that doesn't mean we can release it in the market.There are many factors that affect the release of the increment.The Product increment can be released to market.The Product Increment should be well tested, of high quality, and complete from a technical point of view.Why are these criteria important?Imagine you use a banking app and suddenly your account is debited with a large amount.What would be your experience as a user?It is important that the product is tested.We should make sure that the Critical and High severity bugs are resolved and the product is of high quality and not many known issues are present in it.The Product Increment should be complete from the end user point of view before it is released.Customer considers a piece ofFunctionality completely working.The function has to pass through the DoD.In the next sub heading, we will talk about DoD.
When the Product increment can be released to market, we have seen from technical point of view.We can see from the customer's point of view.We just can't go ahead and release the Product despite meeting all the technical criteria.It involves a lot of decisions.The cost of release and the economics determine the release's Frequency.If the Product Increment is not too expensive to release by the end of each sprint, then the Customer can decide how many sprints he wants the product to be released in.
If the User story is complete or not, the definition of done is a checklist or acceptance criteria which is fixed or the same across all the user stories.Every user story has to meet all the requirements of the definition of done to pass or be marked as complete to be shipped.The criteria of the Department of Defense is the same for all User Stories.All code check in, code review, unit testing passed, functional testing done, demo done to the client are some of the sample DOD for a User stories.The Product Increment is ready to be shipped when all the above DOD checkpoints are checked.The definition of done varies from team to team.There is a sample Definition of Done used.
At the end of each sprint, the Development Teams deliver Potentially Shippable product Increment which is complete, tested and of quality.The increment of the product goes up with each sprint.This Product Increment is ready to use and it depends on a customer whether to release it in the market immediately or not depending on the finances.If the definition of Done for a Product increment is part of a rule, principles or procedure of the development association, all Scrum Team Members must follow it as a protocol.Product Increment is an important artifact of the framework.