Potentially Shippable Product Increment

The output of every Sprint is called a Potentially Shippable Product Increment. The work of all the teams must be integrated before the end of every Sprint—the integration must be done during the Sprint. This allows:

• keeping the Whole Product Focus
• increasing Transparency and reducing risk, as we have no surprises in undone work
• increasing flexibility (or agility) by reducing work in progress
• keeping feedback cycles short so that we can continuously improve

Potentially shippable is a statement about the quality of the software and not about the value or the marketability of the software.” When a product is potentially shippable then that means “that all the work that needs to be done for the currently implemented features has been done and technically the product can be shipped” but it doesn’t mean that “the features implemented are valuable enough for the customer to want a new release”. The latter is determined by the Product Owner.

Whether the product is truly shippable will depend on the current Definition of Done. If there is a perfect definition of done, then the product can be shipped each Sprint. If the Definition of Done is weak, then there will still be work to be done, leading to less transparency, less flexibility and increased development risk.