Interesting. I would say that John didn't build a solution that met all of the use cases that the business needed.
* To ensure accuracy of transactions, he should have built reporting to meet the needs of accountants.
* To support change, he should have kept his components separate and provided modest testing examples.
* To support developers and operations, he should have found and documented the external dependencies along with steps to verify that they are in place.
Whether product managers didn't uncover these requirements or the business didn't prioritize them, these aspects of the definition of "done" have more to do with thee environment the engineer is working in and less to do with his or her work.
* To ensure accuracy of transactions, he should have built reporting to meet the needs of accountants.
* To support change, he should have kept his components separate and provided modest testing examples.
* To support developers and operations, he should have found and documented the external dependencies along with steps to verify that they are in place.
Whether product managers didn't uncover these requirements or the business didn't prioritize them, these aspects of the definition of "done" have more to do with thee environment the engineer is working in and less to do with his or her work.