We carry out a Spike when we're about to embark on a new piece of work and are finding it hard to make decisions about direction in business terms, technical terms, or both.
Similar in concept to a hackathon, a Spike is an investigatory piece of work which should:
- Answer a single question
- Either be technical or customer-focused
- Reduce uncertainty and create a way forward
The key thing to note is that a Spike doesn't directly contribute to an increment in the working software. As a result, we don't estimate spikes, instead we timebox them. When the timebox is up, we determine if we've answered the question we set out to answer:
- If we have, the next step is to determine how this information ...
